LIBRARY OF COxNGRESS. I 



. ^ I 

f UNITED STATES OF AMERICA f 



- ^:^- 



STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 



A REVIEW 



OF HIS BOOK, 



" THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW FAITH," 



AND 



A CONFUTATION OF ITS MATERIALISTIC VIEWS. 



BY 



HEKMAK:]Sr TJLEICI. 



TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, 

BY 

CHAELES P. KEAUTH, D.D., 

VICE-PROVOST OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



PHILADELPHIA: N^:^ t--r«#1 ^ 
SMITH, ENGLISH & COT, "^ 

710 ARCH STREET. 

EDIKBUKGH: T. & T. CLARK. 

1874. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, 

By smith, ENGLISH & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



PHILADELPHIA ! 
SHERMAN & CO., PRINTERS. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTION: 

The Materialism of our Day, 

Aim of the Present Discussion, 

Importance of the Question, . 

The Problem of the Hour, 

The Materialistic Physicists, . 

Materialism a Power in our Day, 

Necessity of Discussing Materialism, 

Kecent Discussions — Appearance of Strauss's Book 

Strauss's Keviewers, 

Points of Interest in the Reviews of Strauss, 
Strauss's Inconsistency with his Earlier Position 

The Great Physicists, 

Mischievous Tendencies of Strauss's Book, . 
The Political Elements in Strauss, 
The Reactionary Tendency of Strauss's Book, 
Ulrici'S Review of Strauss, .... 

ULRICrS REVIEW OF STRAUSS: 

I. Strauss considered as a Philosophical Thinker, 
II. What Strauss proposes in *' The New Faith 
and the Old Faith:" his real aim the 
Destruction of the Old Faith, . 
III. ''Are we still Christians?". 
lY. ''Have we Religion still?" . 
Y. Strauss's Theory of the Rise of Religion, . 
YI. Strauss's Repudiation of the Argument for 
the Existence of God, .... 



PAGE 

9 
13 
14 
21 
22 
25 
27 
31 
35 
39 
49 
51 
58 
63 
65 
67 

73 



75 
78 
79 
84 

86 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

YII. Immortality of the Soul, .... 91 

VIII. The Essential Nature of Keligion, . . 92 
IX. The Permanent in Keligion — Man and the 

Universe, 95 

X. The New Faith, 98 

XI. The Discovery, 100 

XII. The Good and the Bad, . . . .104 
XIII. Strauss in Conflict with consistent Materi- 
alism ; Pessimism ; Schopenhauer ; Yon 

Hartmann, 106 

Xiy. ^' What is our Apprehension of the Uni- 
verse?'' 108 

XY. The Cosmogony of Kant and La Place, . 113 
XYI. Origin of Life upon Earth — Generatio 

-^quivoca — Organic and Inorganic, . 115 

XYII. Origin of Species — The Darwinian Theory, 120 
XYIII. The Ape and Man — Man and the Animals, 

their Affinities and Distinctions, . . 125 
XIX. The Soul, . . . . . . .128 

XX. Strauss's Appeal to Du Bois-Reymond, . 133 
XXI. The Notion of Design in the Light of Natural 

Science — Philosophy of the Unconscious, 137 
XXII. The setting aside of the Doctrine of Einal 

Causes in Nature by Darwin, . . . 139 

XXIII. <^ How shall we Order our Life V . . 144 

XXIY. The Primary Principle of Morality, . . 146 
XXY. Strauss's attempt to show that he does not hold 

that the Universe is a thing of Chance, . 152 

XXYI. Nature coming to Self-recognition, . . 155 

XXYII. Strauss's direct Contradiction of himself, . 158 
XXYIII. Strauss's Ideal Strivings — His Recognition 

of Mystery, 160 

XXIX. Conclusion— The New Philosophy, . . 162 



INTEODUCTION. 



THE MATERIALISM OF OUR DAY. 

To any reader who knows the vast range of 
topics involved in a complete discussion of 
Materialism, the very dimensions of the volume 
he holds in his hand would show that it pro- 
poses to touch upon no more than a part of a 
part of that vast theme. For the questions of 
Materialism cover the physical, intellectual and 
moral universe. There is nothing deep or high 
in man's life, or thinking, in his present or his 
future, which they do not in some measure 
condition. Materialism calls for an obliteration 
of what is noblest in the past, the abandonment 
of our richest heritages, and a total reconstruc- 
tion of all the present, an abrupt change in all 
that tended to a future with roots deepset in 
the past. If Materialism be successful in estab- 
lishing its claim, it will involve the greatest 
revolution which has ever taken place in the 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

world. To make this volume a complete sum- 
mary, not to sa}^ a survey of all the facts and 
principles which are covered by the assertion 
and exposure of such a system as Materialism, 
would involve the compression of a world to 
the dimensions of a pea. All sciences have 
been made tributary to the false assumptions of 
the Materialism of our day, and all the sciences 
would have to be laid under contribution to fur- 
nish the refutation of it. Here, as everywhere 
the great corrective of abuse is the restoration 
of the right use. The fact that the abuse of 
science has been made to sustain Materialism is 
itself the best evidence that the right use of 
science will most completely overthrow Mate- 
rialism. If so much science promotes Materi- 
alism, it is proof not that we need less science, 
but that we need more. So much more will 
undo the mischief which so much has done. 
Only let the science be real science, and there 
cannot be too much of it. To appeal from 
science in its legitimate sphere, to authority, in 
behalf of religion, is not to secure religion but 
to betray it. Science and Religion are occupied 
with two books, but both books are from one 
hand; in their true workings they are engaged 
in two parts of one great aim. Science moves 
ever toward the proof how supernatural is the 



THE MATERIALISM OF OUR DAY. 11 

natural ; Religion moves toward the proof how 
natural is the supernatural. For nature in the 
narrower sense, is in her spring, Supernatural. 
To this point all natural science constantlj^ ad- 
vances. The more problems natural science 
settles the more it raises ; the more it diminishes 
the sphere in which the speculation of the past 
found its range, the more does it enlarge the 
sphere of the future speculation. Ours is at 
once the age of the suprernest affluence in ques- 
tions solved, and of the most pressing poverty 
in questions opened and unanswered. A ques- 
tion settled is a question planted, and green, 
young questions spring all around it. The more 
we know of l^ature, the more cogent becomes 
the necessity of the Supernatural. On the 
other hand, the Supernatural is within Nature, 
in Nature's broader sense. In this sense Nature 
is identical with the real. Everything is Nature 
that is not non-nature; everything is natural 
that is not unnatural. The Supernatural is not 
to be construed as the contranatural, but as the 
natural itself in its supremest sphere, and God 
and His directest works are supernatural because 
they are by pre-eminence natural. In this sense 
Nature is not a conception embraced in the con- 
ception of God, but as all-embracing, most of 
all embraces God as the Supreme Nature, whose 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

most supernatural works, are, as such, most 
natural. The sciences which represent nature, 
and the faith to which are committed the oracles 
of the Supernatural, must in proportion as they 
prove true to themselves, prove true to each 
other. Whatever may be the apparent difier- 
ence of their origin, though the one seem to 
spring out of the earth, the other to look down 
from heaven, knowledge and faith shall at last 
meet together and kiss each other. It is a 
common canon of science and religion to "judge 
nothing before the time," and yet it is the neg- 
lect of this canon on both sides which has 
been the occasion of their most serious misun- 
derstandings and of their sharpest collisions. 
Some who have professed to represent science, 
have been too ready with their theories, and 
some who have claimed to be special defenders 
of the faith have been too absolute in their in- 
terpretations, and it is precisely between pro- 
visional dogmatical theories, and provisional 
dogmatic interpretations, the severest conflict 
has taken place. It has been a battle of guesses. 
The warfare will ultimately be laid by the over- 
throw of the hasty theory, or of the hasty in- 
terpretation, or of both. 



AIM OF THE PEESENT DISCUSSION. 13 



AIM OF THE PRESENT DISCUSSION. 

Fully to discuss Materialism, which assumes 
to be the philosophy of all knowledge, would 
involve in the nature of the case a presentation 
of an immense body of facts, drawn from the 
intellectual and moral sciences. Simply to 
state the misstatements of Materialism without 
correcting them, or to give its arguments with- 
out answering them, would demand a series of 
elaborate and ponderous volumes. And yet 
this little volume, meant for the fireside and 
the pocket, is large enough and rich enough, to 
give both sides of this great question, in the 
words of very able representatives of both. It 
is sufficiently comprehensive at least to help the 
reader to test what Materialism is made of, and 
to settle the question whether we are willing to 
have the edifice of our convictions built of it. 
In our schoolday Greek reading, under the 
painful embarrassment with which a grammar 
and dictionary invest the ordinarily spontaneous 
process of laughing, we were taught to laugh at 
the Scholastikos, the Greek Irishman, who hav- 
ing a house to sell, carried around a brick as a 
specimen of it. But the Scholastikos, as the 
Irishman not unfrequently is, was perhaps wiser 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

than some who laughed at him. The brick 
settled at least one question, and in settling that, 
settled to many a man all the other questions. 
To the man who wanted a house of marble, the 
brick settled it, that the house of whose material 
if was a specimen was not the house he wanted. 
This volume carries with it, both in the state- 
ments of Strauss, which are given in his own 
words, and in the replies of Ulrici, enough 
evidence to decide what Materialism is. It 
shows in that very world of scientific fact and 
of speculative thought in which Materialism is 
most boastful and arrogant, how little it has to 
tempt the thoughtful man to forego the use of 
logical reason, how little to justify the good 
man in doing violence to his moral sense. It 
shows that sunbaked mud bricks, all the weaker 
for the shining particles glittering in them, com- 
pose the building with which Materialism pro- 
poses to replace the edifice of human convictions 
and faiths, which have stood unmoved through 
the storms of age. 



IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. 

It is impossible for the thinkers of our day to 
look with indifl:erence on its materialistic ten- 
dencies. If views of this class possess, in them- 



IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. 15 

selves, little philosophical importance, they yet 
have a claim on our attention, not only because 
of the great mischief they may produce, but 
also because they are bearing a part in widen- 
ing and intensifying that general interest in 
the natural sciences, of which they are in part 
the effect, in part the cause. All the intensest 
passions of our human life gather about some 
sort of battle. The unfought is unfelt. The 
materialistic struggle more than anj'thing else 
vitalizes the natural sciences — for thinking is, 
after all, the supremest pleasure of thinking 
man. The intellectual beats the material in all 
long races. In the struggle which Materialism 
has produced, germs have been scattered, and 
are already springing, which sooner or later will 
modify in important respects the philosophy of 
the future. The inflaence of the natural sci- 
ences in the sphere of philosophy is more 
marked in our own day than at any period 
since Aristotle, Master of Physics and Master 
of Metaphj^sics, laid in the one the basis of the 
other. Our age pays, not for the first time, the 
greatest of tributes received by that wonderful 
man — the tribute of denouncing him and his 
method, meaning neither the real Aristotle, nor 
the real Aristotelian method, and then following 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

more closely than before in the real walk of the 
great Peripatetic. Ours is an Aristotelian age. 

In one respect, indeed, these last days of 
philosophy tend in a dangerous respect to be 
like its very first — to make Physics everything 
and Metaphysics nothing. But the difierence 
is nevertheless marked, between the earliest 
and latest eras. Physical observation, in our 
day, has developed into science ; all the depart- 
ments of the natural sciences have been im- 
mensely enriched, and some of the most bril- 
liant discoveries of all time have been made. 

This has naturally led to a predominance of 
that class of interests over every other. Ours 
is the era of the physical sciences, and of their 
tributaries and applications. These have thrown 
into the shade all the other departments of 
human thought. Not even civil and political 
issues have excited the interest in the intel- 
lectual world which is excited by the great 
physicists. Our poets, statesmen and soldiers 
have not given to us a household name more 
frequently on our lips than that of Agassiz. l^o 
Englishmen are spoken of more than Darwin 
and Tyndall ; and Humboldt, Lotze, Helm- 
HOLTZ, and a host of others, shine with peculiar 
splendor in the great galaxy of the Germany 
of our age. 



IMPOETANCE OF THE QUESTION. 17 

It is, however, especially the philosophical sci- 
ences which have been injured by the predomi- 
nance of physical studies, when these studies 
have assumed the unnatural position, not of pre- 
supposition to the metaphysical, a place which is 
rightly their due, but of antagonism to it. 
Physical science seems, indeed, to furnish a 
strong contrast to Metaphysics ; the one seems 
so fruitful a field, the other so barren an arena; 
the one claims the power of enforcing convic- 
tion of its facts on every intelligent mind, the 
other is apparently incapable of healing the 
divisions it originates. The physical sciences 
seem so useful in everyday life, going down to 
the heart of the world to warm and enrich us, 
and challenging clouds and stars to help the 
husbandman and the sailor. In contrast with 
them the metaphysical sciences seem so atten- 
uated, so utterly vague ! Mills do not grind, 
nor engines labor at their command. They do 
not put fruits upon our tables, nor fill our fields 
with springing grass for our herds. This con- 
trast becomes the more specious and more un- 
favorable to Metaphysics, because few compar- 
atively have a clear conception of the relation 
of the physical and the intellectual sciences. 
Where a comparison is made, it is often made 
between the highest forms of the physical sci- 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

ences, and the weakest and most extravagant 
forms of metaphysical speculation. We are 
asked to look upon the picture of some Hype- 
rion of the one, by the side of some Satyr of the 
other. Those who know the facts, know that the 
philosophical spirit is the spirit which vitalizes 
all the material with the mental, and connects all 
phenomena with conceptions of the essence they 
represent, all facts with truth, all effects with 
causes, all that is individual with the coherence 
of relations, all premises with inferences, all the 
transient with the ultimate. They know that 
it is the spirit which lays the whole realm of 
nature under tribute, and that without this 
spirit, and the results of its life in men, and its 
labor for men, we should have no natural 
sciences. It is imminent in them even w^hen 
they know it not; its death would be their 
death. It is the life-unit of the coral-bed 
of the accretions of physics. The physical 
sciences are but one efflorescence, among the 
innumerable forms in which the philosophical 
spirit reveals itself. All the physical sciences, 
as sciences, rest upon metaphysical data, and 
develop themselves toward metaphysical se- 
quences. The intensest interest of cultivated 
minds, in the very sphere of what seems most 
like unrelievable physics, turns toward the 



IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. 19 

theory, the hypothesis, the speculation it in- 
volves. Without the metaphysical spirit, the 
chemist sinks to the condition of the other com- 
pound substances of his laboratory; the astron- 
omer is but a big child playing with a big 
Orrery; the geologist possesses the penetration 
of an artesian auger — no more. Such men are 
but the tools of science, not its masters. The 
grand interest which attaches to modern science, 
is at its root an interest in the philosophy it 
involves. An author like Lewes writes a very 
charming book, the theory of whose theory is, 
that the metaphysical sciences are of no value, 
the theory of whose existence as an elaborate 
and favorite work of its author and of the pub- 
lic is, that the history of these valueless things 
has an enchantment of some supreme order for 
himself and them. But after Lewes has warned 
men from metaphysics, by the very inconsistent 
process of fascinating them with its history, he 
discovers that, after all, Comte and the Positivist 
school to the contrary notwithstanding, man 
cannot live by bread alone. He has found that 
his own intellectual life could not endure the 
self-imposed starvation produced by abstinence 
from its true food. As the result of his larger 
experience, he makes a " change of front," and 
tries to cover his movement by masking it with 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

the name of " Metempyrics.'^ He has shown 
that even a very poor system of metaphysics is 
better than none, for Lewes's system is nothing 
more than the hoary, but not venerable, old 
Sensualism, with his hair dyed, and pantaloons 
substituted for knee-breeches. 

Not only cannot the twin sciences be sundered, 
but they cannot bear healthfully a restriction of 
their vital intercommunication. To bind the 
ligament produces a fainting, which would be 
followed by death. It is therefore a shallow and 
ignorant impression, though sometimes cher- 
ished by men who ought to be ashamed to har- 
bor it, that Philosophy in our day has played 
out its part, and that the best thing would be to 
hasten its absorption into physics and physiol- 
ogy. In this extravagant feeling and the sources 
of it, Materialism has found its account. The 
greatest representatives of Materialism have 
been, for the most part, physiologists and physi- 
cians, and from the same professional ranks have 
come some of its most thorough and vigorous 
assailants, for by a necessary law we look for 
the wildest errors, the most progressive truths, 
the soberest conservatism in the same general 
class of observers. Theological heresies origi- 
nate with theologians, and so do the refutations 
of heresies. The clergy corrupt the Church — 



THE PROBLEM OF THE HOUR. 21 

they also reform it; and because physicians and 
physicists have done so much in producing Ma- 
terialism, we look to physicians and physicists 
to do a great work in counteracting and heal- 
ing it. 



THE PROBLEM OF THE HOUR. 

It is admitted that in scientific thinking the 
recent Materialism has scarcely brought in a 
single new idea. It has added nothing appre- 
ciable to La Mettrie, Diderot, and Von Hol- 
BACH. In fact, some of the theories passing as 
novelties in our own day, belong to a very re- 
mote antiquity. But this by no means proves 
that the Materialism of the hour has no signifi- 
cance in Philosophy. It sustains the old theo- 
ries by a vast accumulation of new facts. The 
problem of the hour on one side is that Philos- 
ophy shall demonstrate its present harmony 
with the facts established by Physics, or failing 
to do this, shall adjust itself to them. On the 
other side, it is incumbent on the physical sci- 
ences to use their treasures and their advanced 
condition to aid in producing a philosophical 
system, in which the external world shall har- 
monize with the great metaphysical facts, for 
such facts there are, more certain than those of 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

physics: on their certainty, indeed, all physical 
certainty depends. No part of the body of 
knowledge can say to another part, " I have no 
need of thee !" 

The duty of aid and the necessity of harmony 
between these two great departments of knowl- 
edge has been profoundly felt by the ablest in- 
vestigators of all time, and with increasing force 
to the present hour, in which the conviction cul- 
minates. 'No man can take the highest rank as 
a physicist or metaphysician, who is not both 
physicist and metaphysician. He is not of ne- 
cessity equally both, but in whichever depart- 
ment he may be by pre-eminence, his greatness 
involves a thorough acquaintance with at least 
the results of the other. In the past, among the 
names that have intertwined both glories in one 
wreath, are the nam es of Aristotle, Des Cartes, 
Pascal, Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Schaller, 
and Hegel. Among the living may be men- 
tioned men like Helmholtz, Lotze, Fichte, and 
Ulrici. 

the materialistic physicists. 

The very roll-call of great names in the battle 
against Materialism shows how great is that 
battle, and how materialistic is our asce. We 
see, indeed, very often assertions to the con- 



THE MATERIALISTIC PHYSICISTS. 23 

trary. Sometimes they are made in pure igno- 
rance by good people, whose happy little world 
is their fireside. Sometimes they are made in 
the blind polemical spirit which assumes that 
denial is disproof. Nevertheless it is true, this 
is a materialistic age. The progress of physical 
science, the splendor of recent discovery, the 
wonderful confirmation of the acutest conjec- 
tures of the past, the lustre of the names asso- 
ciated with these movements, have seemed to 
justify the physicists of our day in their exuber- 
ant triumph in the present achievements in the 
world of matter, and in their boundless assurance 
in regard to the future. No men have such pro- 
phetic souls as sanguine physicists. These theo- 
rists sometimes ask no more than a boundless 
past to justify their theories, or not unfrequently 
appeal, as if the gaze of the seer w^ere granted 
them, to that happier future which is to furnish 
the missing links in the chain of demonstration. 
The sole reason that they cannot make out the 
theory of the present is, either that they cannot 
see quite far enough back into the past, or can- 
not see quite far enough into the future, except 
in the power of that theoretic faith which, dis- 
daining such easy things as removing mountains, 
creates or uncreates universes at pleasure, and 
plays with nebulae as boys play with marbles. 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

They utterly shame the believers in Revelation 
by the way in which they make faith the sub- 
stance of things hoped for, and the evidence of 
things not seen. 

Darwinism has simply to get far enough back 
to reach the ape of the past, to see him in the 
way of evolution to the man of the present, or 
to plunge deeply enough into the ages to come 
to see some man of the future evolved from an 
ape of the present — for we are primal to the fu- 
ture as the past is primal to us — and then the 
theory has a fact which fairly supports it — a 
something it does not possess to this hour. 
And as Darwinism needs but one of these two 
little things to make it an established theory, 
and as it has the boundless past to furnish one, 
the endless future to furnish the other — why, 
in a matter which may require hunting to all 
eternity, should we attempt to hurry these 
trusting adherents, in the production of this 
fact? If they wish to meet the debts of sci- 
ence by renewing its notes, they have many 
mercantile precedents for the method, which 
postpones the crash, even when it does not pre- 
vent it. If the enthusiast in the physical the- 
ories of the hour is willing to promise the bear- 
skin before he has caught the bear, is not that 
a reason, in the judgment of charity, why we 



MATERIALISM A POWER IN OUR DAY. 25 

should pardon him if, in fact, he sometimes 
mistakes the promise of the skin for the actual 
possession of the bear, and that instead of con- 
sidering the theory as a thing to be proven, he 
lays it down as a first principle by which every- 
thing known is to be explained, and in virtue 
of which everything desired is to be assumed ? 



MATERIALISM A POWER IK OUR DAY. 

The lowest and the most practical of the 
characteristics of our day unite with some of its 
most brilliant and extravagant, to give to Ma- 
terialism a special potency. In no land is the 
temptation, in some of its forms, greater than 
in our own, where material nature in her un- 
subdued majesty challenges man to conflict, or, 
in her fresh charms and munificent life, lures 
him to devotion. Materialism is popularized in 
our day. The magazines and papers are full of 
it. It creeps in everywhere, in the text-books, 
in school-books, in books for children, and in 
popular lectures. Materialism has entered into 
the great institutions of Germany, England, and 
America. Our old seats of orthodoxy have 
been invaded by it. IJew England, the storm- 
gauge of the rising thought of our land, begins 
to quiver on the edge of the coming hurricane. 



26 INTRODUCTION. 

The Materialism of our day is very versatile. 
It takes many shapes, often avoids a sharp con- 
flict, assumes the raiment of light, knows how 
to play well the parts of free thought, truth, 
and beneficence. All the more securely does it 
pass in everywhere, so that we have Material- 
ism intellectual, domestic, civil, philanthropic, 
and religious. Strangest of all, in a philosoph- 
ical point of view, we have systems, like the 
system of Schopenhauer, for example, which, 
under the form of the supremest Idealism, have 
the practical power of the lowest Materialism. 
Beginning in the sublimation of the spirit, they 
end by wallowing in the filthiest sty of the flesh. 

Much of the Materialism of our day is servile 
and dogmatic, implicit in credulity, and insolent 
in assertion. Professing to be independent of 
names, and calling men to rally about the stand- 
ard of absolute freedom from all authority, it 
parades names where it has names to parade, 
and vilifies the fair fame of those whom it can- 
not force into acquiescence or silence. Claim- 
ing to be free from partisanship, it is full of 
coarse intolerance. It is an inquisition, with 
such tortures as the spirit of our age still leaves 
possible. The rabies theologorum of which it 
loves to talk, pales before the rabies physicorum 
of this class, sometimes as directed against each 



NECESSITY OF DISCUSSING MATERIALISM. 27 

other, yet more as directed against the men of 
science or of the church, who resist tlieir 
tlieories. '' If," says Erdmann, '* we are to 
"suppose that natural philosophy teaches us to 
" be dogmatic on topics about which we under- 
" stand nothing, then has natural philosopliy 
" never found such zealous adepts as are found 
" amons: those who claim to be exact investio-a- 
"tors. Anybody in our day who knows how 
" to handle a microscope, imagines that without 
"anything further, he can venture to be oracu- 
"lar on cause, condition, force, matter, logical 
" law, and truth." 



NECESSITY OF DISCUSSING MATERIALISM. 

These are a few of the indisputable facts 
w^hich show that by pre-eminence Materialism 
is at once the greatest, both of the speculative 
and practical questions of the hour. Yet there 
are good and intelligent people who object even 
to an exposure of Materialism which ma^' inci- 
dentally bring it to the notice of some, who 
they imagine, would apart from such an ex- 
posure, have remained in ignorance or indiffer- 
ence as to the whole subject. They think that 
these views, pernicious as they justly regard 
them, and indeed, because they do so regard 



28 INTRODUCTION. 

them, should be kept completely out of sight 
wherever it is possible. It is quite possible that 
some may think that a knowledge of Ulrici's 
refutation is too dearly purchased by the knowl- 
edge of Strauss's errors which goes with it. 

To such objections we answer, First : Ignor- 
ance is neither innocence nor safet3\ Knowl- 
edge, indeed, like all possessions, is capable of 
abuse. There is danger in whatever we do, 
and wherever there is danger in doing, there 
may be danger in leaving undone. There is 
danger of accident in exercise, there is the 
greater danger of loss of health in not exercis- 
ing; there is the danger of choking, or of sur- 
feiting in eating, the greater danger of starva- 
tion in not eating. Many men are drowned in 
svi^imming, many more men are drowned be- 
cause they do not know how to s*vim. Hazard 
is the law of life, a law which becomes more 
exacting as life rises into its higher forms. Life 
itself binds up all hazards, and is itself the 
supreme hazard. He only never risks who never 
lives, and he who incurs none of the hazards of 
life performs none of its duties. 

But if ignorance were innocence and safety, 
the features of our time on which we have 
dw^elt, show that ignorance here is impossible. 
The choice is not between ignorance and some 



NECESSITY OF DISCUSSING MATERIALISM. 29 

sort of knowledge of Materialism, but between 
intelligent and correct impressions and false 
ones. Which shall the minds that are forming 
have : a knowledge of Materialism in all its 
strength, without the antidote, or of Materialism 
falsely understated, with the possibility, almost 
certainty, that they will one day see that it has 
been understated, and rush to the conclusion 
that its opponents did not dare to let the truth 
about it be known, or shall we have Materialism 
fairly presented and fairly met? If the last be 
the best course, then this volume meets a real 
want, for in it Strauss presents the plea for 
Materialism more attractively than it has ever 
been presented, and in it Ulrici annihilates 
that plea. 

Especially is it the duty of educated men to 
know the grounds of the most dangerous and 
seductive error of our time, and to be master of 
the arguments by which that error is overthrown. 
The educated man ought to feel that without 
this knowledge he is not really educated. But 
if he be indifferent to it for himself, he should 
possess it for the benefit of others. No man 
liveth to himself, least of all the man of culture. 
He is of the class who are to be guides in their 
generation, and he must be willing to accept the 
responsibilities, and incur the risks of his voca- 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

tion. The physician cannot heal contagious 
diseases without hazarding contagion. To the 
scholar and thinker others will come. The 
weakness of the thinker is the weakness of the 
seeker. The is^norance of the scholar is the 
hopeless ignorance of the learners, as, on the 
other hand, his knowledge will be their knowl- 
edge, his strength of assurance their conviction. 
It will to many be enough that he understands 
the problem, if the^^ do not. The true scholar 
and thinker is, at last, the last power. In the 
world of thought the many decide, but the few 
decide the many. It is as in most free govern- 
ments, the voters are a democracy, the rulers 
an aristocracy. 

The mere seeming to avoid fair discussion, 
does more mischief than a real acquaintance 
with Materialism possibly can. To be cowardly 
is to be beaten without a battle. Materialism, 
with the arrogance common to all error, claims 
to be invincible. If it be not attacked, or its 
attack be declined, its explanation is invariably 
found, in the fears of its antagonists. 



APPEARANCE OF STRAUSS's BOOK. 31 



RECEKT DISCUSSIONS. APPEARANCE OF STRATJSS'S 

BOOK. 

The questions associated with Materialism 
have been discussed most earnestly and fully 
among the nations which may fairly claim the 
intellectual leadership of the world. England, 
France and America have names of renown on 
both sides of the question. Holland has thinkers 
whose contributions to this single department 
of thought, would reward the man who acquired 
its language solely to read them. It is in Ger- 
many, however, we find the treatment of these 
questions conducted with the most distinguished 
ability. Whether we ask for the most popular 
or the most profound works for Materialism, or 
against it, it is Germany which furnishes them. 
On the one side she has had Feuerbach, Mole- 
SCHOTT, BucHNER, and VoGT, as the chief advo- 
cates of Materialism; on the other Schaller, 

TiTTMANN, FrOHSCHAMMER, J. H. FiCHTE, FaBRI, 

BoHNER, and Ulrici, as its opponents, and now 
within a year past a host of able writers, old 
and new, has sprung to arms, on a new declara- 
tion of war. 

This latest and sharpest struggle to which the 
Materialistic controversy has led is that in which 
the offensive was taken by David Friedrich 



32 INTRODUCTION. 

Strauss. The ^' great critic/' as his friends 
loved to consider him, and as he loved to con- 
sider himself, brought to religion the sort of 
criticism which the Vandals brought to art, the 
criticism of barbarous, ruthless demolition, the 
savage iconoclasm, which spends its fury on the 
beauty it can neither comprehend nor feel. 
Among the secrets of Strauss's power has been 
that by skilful following he seemed to lead the 
tendencies of his time, that he wrote in a style 
admitted to be classic in form, and that he had 
a plausible superficiality, which made the indo- 
lent and half-informed reader satisfied that he 
saw to the bottom of the subject, because he 
saw to the bottom of the book. More than all 
he was indebted to a certain tempered extrava- 
gance, a power of fanaticism under a form of 
rationality. He gave himself with inexorable 
concentration in each case to a leading idea, 
never his own — he has not added a fact to 
knowledge nor a principle to speculation — and 
on this idea he has worked with a unity of aim, 
an industry of accumulation both of serviceable 
fact and illustration, which has made his pre- 
sentation irresistible to many minds. That 
Strauss was at once so earnest and so cool, so 
much the moulder of the passions of others and 
the controller of his own, made him one of the 



APPEARANCE OF STRAUSS's BOOK. 33 

great powers of his age. Essentially frivolous, 
both intellectually and ethically, he yet gives 
the reader an impression of earnestness and 
moral feeling, and thus influences those who, 
in the happy phrase of Philippson, " confound 
" the evidences of truthfulness with the evi- 
" dences of truth." 

This man, not, we believe, without the order 
of Providence, came forth, in the evening of 
his long life, with a sort of summary, a canon- 
ical epitome, of the results of all his learning, 
and of all his speculation. It was the finality 
of a brilliant career, in which inordinate vanity 
had been wonderfully gratified. The man who 
had tried to shake all forms of religion, pro- 
posed, in his modesty, a compensation for them 
all in a discovery of his own. The great foe of 
all creeds, and most of all of the old creed, 
proposed a new creed, which was but an old 
creed, forgotten into newness. After trying 
to rob all men of their faith, he came forth with 
a confession of his own faith ; a faith in which 
conscious matter reverenced and worshipped 
unconscious matter; in which reason bowed at 
the altar of the Unreason which had given it 
being; a faith without Grod or Providence, with- 
out spirit, freedom, or accountability; a faith 
devoid of a recognition of creation, redemption, 



34 INTRODUCTION. 

or sanctification, of sin or of salvation. It had 
no heaven to desire, no hell to shun. Its last 
enemy is not death, but immortality; its goal 
is extinction. The onl}^ " Incarnation " of which 
it knows is *' the Incarnation of the ape.'' Like 
the universe it imagined, this faith is uncreated 
and self-existent, an effect without a cause, a re- 
sult without an antecedent, an end without aim, 
plan, design, or means. This is the '' new faith '' 
of Strauss, to which the new book is devoted. 
It is not w^onderful that such a book from such 
a man attracted extraordinary attention, that it 
ran rapidly through a number of editions, and 
was eagerly read by thousands. It owed some- 
thing to the virtues of its manner, its literary 
graces, its felicitous sophistries; it owed much 
more to the vices of its matter. A few came 
to its perusal in the hope of learning some- 
thing; many took it up to find in it flattery for 
the convictions they already held. Most readers 
aimed at no more than the gratification of curi- 
osity. The first class were bitterly disappointed ; 
the second found that the sweetness of the flat- 
tery had some bitter qualifications ; the last 
found the gratification they sought, for the 
book is really one of the strangest in the annals 
of Literature, and will be longest remembered 
as one of its curiosities. 



STRAUSS'S REVIEWERS. 35 



STRAUSS'S REVIEWERS. 



The intrinsic interest of the questions dis- 
cussed, the antecedent general excitement of 
the public mind in regard to them, the great- 
ness of Strauss's name, the marvellous suc- 
cess of his book in interesting men; and yet 
more, the audacious and dangerous character of 
its doctrines, the arrogance of its assertions, 
the Ultramontanism of its unbelief, and of its 
denunciation of doctrines in opposition to it, — 
Strauss was at once the Ecumenical Council of 
the " We,^^ which proclaimed the dogma of the 
atheistic infallibility, and the Pio Nino who 
for the present embodied it — the boasts of in- 
dependence in connection with the servility of 
its adhesions, the ultraisms of radicalism on 
which it built the ultraisms of conservatism, 
the all-destroying infidelity on which it reared 
its world-challenging highest faith — all these 
thing's led to an extraordinarv number of no- 
tices of it. Scarcely one of them, even from the 
number of Strauss's warmest admirers, gave 
the book unmingled commendation. The great 
mass of notices coming from thinkers of various 
schools — Israelite and Christian, orthodox, ra- 
tionalistic and old Catholic; from divines, men 
of science, philosophers and practical men — with 



36 INTRODUCTION. 

a wonderful uniformity, condemned the prin- 
ciples of the book, exposed its falsities of argu- 
ment and its errors in fact, and showed that all 
the moral relief which any of its better views 
offered, were in utter conflict with the funda- 
mental principles of the speculations on which 
they professedly rested. Few books have at- 
tracted so many readers as Strauss's last book; 
very few have disappointed and disgusted so 
many. 

Nothing, perhaps, could give a more vivid 
sense of the affluence of German learning, and 
the vigor of German thinking, than to notice 
what an amount of both has been called forth 
by this single book of Strauss. The catalogue 
of its literature would make a volume, and this 
literature, in some shape or other, takes in 
nearly every great question of the day, relig- 
ious, literary, educational, philosophical, politi- 
cal and practical. 

For reasons of various kinds, some of the re- 
viewers of Strauss take a special prominence. 
MoRiTZ Carriers is distinguished as a historian 
of art, and a writer on aesthetics. Huber, Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy in the University of Mu- 
nich, Knoodt, Zierngebl and Michelis, are 
"Old Catholics ;'' and it is a remarkable fea- 
ture of the time that the " Old Catholics'' have 



STRAUSS'S REVIEWERS. 37 

been represented with such special ability in 
the battle against Strauss. 

Among philosophers by profession who have 
borne a part in the discussion may be mentioned 
Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who in his latest 
work, " The Theistic View of the World," has 
presented an account of the grand problems of 
the speculation of our day, with much that 
bears specially upon Strauss. 

Alfred Dove is editor of the periodical '' Im 
neuer Reich,'' and has won distinction as an es- 
sayist. Dr. Weis, the chemist, is author of 
" Antimaterialism," in which he has shown 
marked ability as an investigator of nature and 
as a philosophical thinker. Frenzel has writ- 
ten an article under the title — suggested by the 
Edda — " Twilight of the Gods," an article which 
NiPPOLD pronounces " classical." 

One of the very ablest replies to Strauss is 
from the pen of Philippson, the representative 
of reformatory Judaism, widely known by his 
numerous vigorous and brilliant works. Haus- 
rath has written on the New Testament his- 
tory. Sporri is of the school of " liberal Protes- 
tant " theology. Jijrgen Bona Meyer is Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy at Bonn. 

The latest works from German hands which 
have reached us are Frohschammer's ''The 

2 



38 INTRODUCTION. 

New Science and the New Faith," Ziegler's 
"Reply to Huber/' and Stutz's Work (1874). 

In America, the discussion has been opened 
by reviews in the April number of the '' Meth- 
odist Quarterly/' and of the "Presbyterian 
Quarterly.'^ The latter article is by Prof. 
Henry B. Smith. He designs to follow it by a 
further discussion, but as it stands, it establishes 
a claim to a place among the best things which 
the theme has called forth. 

Holland is very strongly represented in Eau- 
WENHOFF and Scholten, professors at Leyden, 
two of the ablest writers of our day. Yera, of 
Naples, has reviewed Strauss at great length, 
from the Hegelian point of view, of which 
Strauss was originally an ardent supporter, 
and which, indeed, furnishes the basis for his 
critical works. Mariano has reviewed (Rome, 
1874) both Strauss and Vera. 

In England Sterling has reviewed Strauss 
in the "Athenaeum,'' June, 1873. An article 
by Scholten appears in " The Theological Re- 
view," May, 1873. 

NiPPOLD has given an account of the literature 
called forth by the controversy, but even his ap- 
pendix, dated August 11th, 1873, was too early 
to foreclose the bibliography of the subject. 



REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 39 



P0II!^TS OF ITSTTEREST IN THE REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 

Among the many points of interest in these 
reviews, one of the most striking is the esti- 
mates, general and particular, which they put 
upon Strauss. They nearly without exception 
show that no antecedent aversion is the cause 
of their dislike of this book, but that on the 
contrary they were disposed to honor and mag- 
nify him. 

" The overwhelming impression made by the 
"book is due to the undeniable talent of the 
" author, to the actual beauty of portions of it, 
"especially of the tributes to the great poets 
"and musicians of German v, and to the nov- 
"elty of the idea of bringing into unity the re- 
" suits of theological criticism and of the latest 
"investigations of nature, and of welding them 
" together in a systematic view of the world and 
"of life."* "That in the darling controversy 
"of the hour this book has attracted almost 
"more notice than all the others too:ether, is a 
"clear proof that Strauss represents one of the 
"great powers in the realms of mind. "f "The 
"first question which the book forced upon us 
"was, how so acute a thinker, so practiced a 

■^ Rauwenhoff. ' | Nippold. 



40 INTRODUCTION. 



a 



writer, so finished and cautious a critic, could 
^' lower himself to the position of a blindly 
''credulous train-bearer of the most vulgar Ma- 
"terialism; at a time, too, when this view is 
''beginning to decline, when even the more 
"acute physiologists, in the most explicit terms 
"and with a full statement of their reasons, are 
"abandoning the materialistic explanation of 
"the phenomena of mind. The solution is 
"found in the fact that Strauss is and remains 
"a combatant in the sphere of theology, and 
"seeks subsidiary troops from every direction 
"to sustain him there."* Beyschlag, Philipp- 
SON, Frenzel, and others pay tribute to the 
personal honorableness of Strauss, but other 
critics, as W. Lang, point to special instances 
of unfair dealing in his book. "Of construct- 
"ive reason he shows but a feeble trace; of the 
"heart, in what it truly holds, and of its meas- 
"ureless importance for the race, he seems to 
"have not a glimpse. In the scientific part of 
"his book he keeps house entirely with what 
"he borrows, all his creative power and origi- 
"nality deserts him, and if he were the critic of 
" the book, instead of being its author, he would 
"be the first to expose its weaknesses. When 

* I. H. Fichte. 



REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 41 

'we get out of the woods of the criticism of 
'Christianitv, and down into the field of re- 
Migion at large, we see Strauss at once desti- 
'tate of resources of his own, and going into 
'consultation with Hume, Epictetus, and Lud- 
'wio Feuerbach. We frankly confess our 
'opinion that for a German thinker he employs 
'such clumsy weapons that he must himself 
'feel ashamed of them. On what a feeble pub- 
'lic he must have counted. He will not terrify 
'us with his epithet 'old-fashioned.' His own 
'imaginary counter-proofs have already become 
'old-fashioned. Strauss calls his views 'new.' 
'They are not new, they are merely the newest 
' manifestation of a very ancient tendency of the 
'mind. They are old, and have long been 
'passed by. In vain does he cling to Kant; 
'Voltaire and Karl Voot have grasped him, 
'and drag him after them; vain is his fright at 
'Schopenhauer and Von Hartman; that he 
'does not yield himself to them is to be put to 
'the score of his weakness."* 

"That a deaf man should not undertake to 
'write the history of music, that a blind man 
'should not propose to give the world a history 
'of art, would not be disputed, and yet there be 

•^ Philippson. 



42 INTRODUCTION. 

'' curious people who think it just the thing that 
''conscious, unblushing, systematic irreligious- 
"ness should write the life of Jesus. Is it pos- 
''sible for a man to write the history of a move- 
" ment of the soul, with which he feels no con- 
''genialit^^, but toward which he takes a purely 
''negative attitude? Can a man who regards 
"religion as the fantastic product of the addled 
"mind, even form a judgment whether the 
"history of a founder of a religion is a thing 
"that could possibly be written ?"* 

Strauss's comparison of w^hat claims to be 
Christianity in the present with the Christianity^ 
of the past, leads Dove to say: "We may in- 
"deed be drawn in this way to deny with 
" Strauss the claim of the present to the Chris- 
"tian name, or we may, with Feuerbach, de- 
"ride it as a 'dissolute, characterless, comfort- 
'"able, belles-lettres, coquettish, epicurean 
"'Christianity.' But is this a historic way of 
"treating the matter? Would it not be just 
"as fair to assume as the classic standard of 
"the Germanic, the German character at a par- 
"ticular period, say, for example, the time of 
"Otto the Great, and allow us Germans of to- 
"day to pass, at the very highest, for nothing 

^ Hausrath. 



REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 43 

"better than ^dissolute, characterless, comfort- 
"^able, belles-lettres, coquettish, epicurean Ger- 
"'mans?"' 

That so many of Strauss's old admirers 
should take up arms against him, is explained 
in some measure by the fact that his candid 
statement of the logical finality of his move- 
ment has been very alarming to a large class of 
them. The answer of this class to the question, 
*'' Are we Christians still ?" has constantly been 
that thej" are Christians of the purest and the 
best. They do not receive Christ in his personal 
claims; they acknowledge in him nothing 
superhuman ; they repudiate alike the miracles 
wrought by him, and the miraculous events 
which are parts of his own history, but all the 
more in the power of the etherealized, unembar- 
rassed residuum, can they soar as Christians. 
They repudiate a religion about Christ and con- 
fine themselves to the religion of Christ ; they, 
in a word, claim to be of the same religion with 
Christ; he is at best a mere primus inter peaces. 
And yet he is hardly that — beyond the credulous 
adherents of the old faith, they are veritable 
Christians, because they have improved upon 
the Teacher, and are more Christian than Christ 
himself. But Strauss abandons them in this 
claim, and insists that it is dishonorable for him- 



44 INTRODUCTION. 

self and those who stand with him in his criti- 
cisms of Christ and Christianity, to call them- 
selves Christians. He shows that Christianity 
in its very essence involves the personal claims 
of Christ; that to take the name of the dimly 
seen enthusiast of Galilee, and yet deny the 
miracles, without the claims of which for him, 
that name would never have reached us, is 
absurd. Jesus might have been all of truest 
and best that the strongest claim for him has 
ever asserted, " and yet," says Strauss, " his 
" doctrines would have been like leaves driven 
" and scattered before the wind, had not a 
" fond faith in his resurrection bound together 
'' these leaves in one compact mass."* Strauss 
says, in eftect. We have outgrown our old posi- 
tion. From knowing little of Jesus, we have 
advanced till we know nothing ; to pretend to 
know anything carries us back to the old ortho- 
dox position which claims to know everything. 
The logic of the blind old faith is with the 
Creeds of the churches, the logic of the new 
faith is Materialism and Atheism. 

Strauss who commenced by killing the old 
school of Rationalists with his myths, ends with 
killing the whole brood of the mythical Chris- 

^ Alt. u. Neu. Glaub. Sechst. Aufl., 73. 



REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 45 

tians with his ''new faith.'' The fine line he 
once drew between the permanent and tran- 
sient in Christianity has vanished. He has 
got the whole in one neck now, and the blow 
falls. Everything in Christianity is transient. 
The insatiate old critic, born as he claims, to be 
a ruthless destroyer, having disposed of every- 
thing else, eats his own words, and Saturn-like 
ends the scene by devouring his own ofi:spring. 
The weeping and protestations of these hapless 
children are the attestations of their reluctance 
to vanish within the expanding jaws of this tre- 
mendous old anthropophagite. 

That Strauss greatly miscalculated the power 
of his leadership in this new movement is cer- 
tain. "The 'We,'" says Frenzel, "furnish, I 
" fear, the matter of the philosopher's first decep- 
" tion. Certainly a large number of cultivated 
" persons, and these form the only class brought 
" into account here, will follow his first steps; but 
" with every step of his advance, the number of 
" his adherents, or, rather we should style them, 
" those who share his views, more and more 
" melts away. Some of them will hold fast to this 
" point, others to that, in the old faith. There 
" are those who will not abandon the immortality 
" of the soul in some shape ; others will not find 
" the Darwino-Yogto-Straussian primal ape at 



46 INTRODUCTION. 

''all to their taste. When Strauss reaches the 
''goal of his views of religion, his view of the 
" universe, he will find very few with him, and 
" when out of theory he springs into the prac- 
" tical, making his leap from religion into poli- 
"tics, he will find himself alone." " Philoso- 
" phy equally with religion, rests at last on the 
" unfathomable. No man hath seen the aveng- 
" ing God of the Old Testament, or God the 
"Father, revealed in the New. But neither 
" has any man ever taken a survey of Strauss's 
" universe. The one equally with the other is a 
conception. Adam the first man lives only in 
the Mosaic record, but does, perchance, Dar- 
win's primal ape have a better hold on life ? 
" He too has vanished and left no trace. The 
" theologians are enthusiasts for Adam, the 
" zoologists are enthusiasts for the ape. That is 
" the total difterence. 

" If Strauss imagines that he is actually able, 
" as he wishes, to establish his new faith and 
" suppress Christianity, he seems to have fallen 
"into a fatal illusion — the illusion of Voltaire 
"and Diderot. They imas-ined that because 
they were unbelievers themselves, the time 
must come when nobody would believe, the 
time when all men would be philosophers. 
Nevertheless with the whole development of 



REVIEWS OF STRAUSS. 47 

"humanity lying before us, we see a vanishing 
" minority in the path of philosophy, an over- 
'' whelming mjijority following after religion. 
" For whole ages together philosophy' has been 
" dumb ; in no age has the voice of religion been 
"silenced." 

Strauss is charged by a number of the re- 
viewers with ignorance, or persistent ignoring of 
what is strongest in opposition to his own views. 
He and his school are blamed with appealing to 
authority as arbitrarily as the most implicit 
orthodoxy does. Vogt and Moleschott are 
exalted to the place of Church Fathers. Froh- 
SCHAMMER, after commending Strauss's early 
labors, goes on to say : " The more do we re- 
" gret that Strauss has now gone to the op- 
" posite extreme. He has forsaken the purely 
" human, rational, and ideal position for which 
" he battled against the supernatural and irra- 
" tional position of Faith, and has fallen into 
" a subhuman, materialistic theory, as ground- 
" less and pernicious as the one he rejected. 
" Yet to supply the defects of this very theory, 
" he puts forth by way of enactment his own 
" strength of faith, that sort of faith which he 
" has so critically and decidedly refused to allow 
" for the benefit of anything else. 

" Our regret is the greater and more just, 



48 INTRODUCTION. 

'' since we are threatened with the formation of 
'' a new priestcraft, a priestcraft of Atheism and 
" Materialism, which will be no less fanatical 
'' against those who cannot accept it than ' Su- 
" pernaturalism' has been; which will demand 
''just as blind a faith even for its utterly ground- 
" less assertions as this has done, and will 
" throughout proceed in just as uncritical a 
" way. Any one acquainted with the writings 
" of the most renowned representatives of Ma- 
" terialism, will readily perceive the truth of 
" this statement. He will not fail to observe 
" that this tendency shows a common affinity 
" and a parallelism with that old credulous 
" Supernaturalism, in the ignorant supercil- 
" iousness and blind depreciation it displays 
" toward philosophy, and in its disposition to 
" treat all that is ideal in feeling and judgment 
" as useless ' drivel' or empty fancy.'' 

Strauss is censured for doing violence to his 
national affinities, which ought to have been 
with men like Fichte the younger, Weisse, 
LoTZE, and the German philosophers in gen- 
eral. He has renounced them all in favor of 
the wisdom of the French Encyclopedists, and 
of the " Systeme de la Nature." " God and 
" the Universe," says Carriere, " are not 
" merely ' two equivalents for the same thing,' 



STRAUSS'S INCONSISTENCY. 49 

" and the total result of the entire modern 
" philosophy in regard to the nature of God, 
'' does not end in this, as Strauss assures us it 
" does. Baader, Schelling, Krause, taught 
" the personality of God. Lotze, Lazarus, of 
'' the school of Herbart, Weisse, and Fichte 
" the younger, coming rather from the direction 
'' of Hegel, Trendlenburg, Ulrici, Wirth, 
'' Ritter, Huber, and very many other thinkers, 
" have devoted comprehensive works to the 
'' establishment of a specific apprehension of 
'' this question very different from that which 
" Strauss represents. Though Strauss will not 
" look at these books, they are none the less 
" there.'* Carriere specially mentions Ulrici's 
" God and Nature," as a book to which Strauss 
ought to have had regard. 



strauss's inconsistency with his earlier 
position. 

That Strauss has departed from his earlier 
position is acknowledged by all his reviewers. 
The one set charges it on him as the change of 
an inconsistent man. The other, which includes 
his most determined friends and his extremest 
foes, unites in declaring that his present posi- 
tion is but the change of ripening and of 



50 INTRODUCTION. 

more matured consistency. Strauss liad said : 
*' Where shall we find in such beauty as we lind 
"it in Jesus, that mirroring purity of soul, which 
" the fury of the storm may agitate but cannot 
" cloud ? Where has there been so grand an 
^' idea, so restless an activity, so exalted a sacri- 
*' lice for it as in Jesus? Who has been the 
"founder of a work which has endowed with 
" as rich treasures, in as high a degree, the 
"masses of men and nations through the long 
"ages, as the Tvork which bears the name of 
" Christ ? As little as mankind can be without 
religion, so little can they be without Christ. 
. . . And this Christ, as inseparable from the 
supremest shaping of religion, is historical 
not mythical; he is an individual, not a bare 
" svmbol." 

From the Strauss of 1839, the transition is so 
great to the Strauss of 1872, that his English 
translator (apparently a novice, furnished with 
a very imperfect dictionary), has not dared 
fairly to reproduce all of his coarseness, in con- 
nection with the name of Christ. If Strauss 
knew how to develop legitimately from the 
point he abandoned to the point he has reached, 
the logic is resistless that there is no consistent 
position between the Christ of the old faith and 
the Materialistic Atheism of the new. But if 



THE GREAT PHYSICISTS. 51 

the Strauss of the inferences be illogical, how 
stall we regard the Strauss of the premises ? 

THE GREAT PHYSICISTS. 

The nature of the theme and of the time has 
led to a large summoning into court of the men 
of the past, and still more of the present, whose 
names add lustre to the physical sciences. 
Among the dead, the names most frequently 
cited are those of Aristotle, Newton, Kant, 
La Place, Reimarus, Lamarck, Cuvier, Oken, 
LiEBia, Johannes Mijller, Eisenlohr and 
Rudolf Wagner. Humboldt's remark, made 
the more telling by his general admiration of 
Strauss, is quoted: " What has not pleased me 
" in Strauss, is the levity he displays in the 
" sphere of natural history, in his readiness to 
" find the origination of the organic out of the 
^'inorganic, and the formation of man himself 
" out of the primeval slime of Chaldea." Agas- 
siz's influence does not seem to have been im- 
paired even by Bijchner's intolerable impu- 
dence in asserting that his anti-Darwinian views 
were an accommodation to the Puritan atmo- 
sphere which surrounded him in America. 
Among the names of living authors we may 
mention a few which are specially prominent. 



52 INTRODUCTION. 

Yon Baer, of Konigsberg, is distinguislied in 
the History of Development and in Zootomy. 
Clausius, of Bonn, is renowned as a physi- 
cist, especially in the establishment of the doc- 
trine of heat as a mode of motion. For his 
merits in this he received the great Huygen's 
gold medal in 1870. Bonders, of Utrecht, is 
illustrious as a physiologist and oculist, and is 
the founder of a great system of ophthalmology. 
He is ''an investigator of acknowledged geni- 
*' alit}^ thoroughness and many-sidedness. His 
" very numerous writings are distinguished by 
" clearness and elegance.^' He was the first to 
apply the principle of the conservation of force 
to the animal organism. Du Bois-Reymond, 
of Berlin, pupil of Johannes Mijller, holds 
the chair of his master. His renown is very 
great in the general field of natural sciences, 
but is pre-eminently so in " animal electricity." 
Helmholiz, of Berlin, occupies a high posi- 
tion among the German physicists, and he owes 
his distinction in no small measure to the phil- 
osophical spirit of his investigations. He has 
united the most complete, many-sided, and thor- 
ough elaboration of the individual minutise with 
a range of view v^hich takes in the whole in its 
greatness. By physiological investigations he 
has been carried to results which, at many 



THE GREAT PHYSICISTS. 53 

points, touch those which Kant reached by 
purely metaphysical processes. Lotze, of Got- 
tingen, is one of the most modest, and yet one 
of the profoundest and most brilliant of that 
grandest school of thinkers who are great both 
in physical science and in metaphysics. His 
'' Mikrokosraus'' is a classic masterpiece in 
both, hardly equalled, never surpassed, by any 
work on its theme. It required a ripe man in 
a ripe age to produce it. Fechner, of Leipzig, 
also distinguished in the two departments, oc- 
cupies a Spinozistic-Kantian position. Virchow 
is one of the glories of the medical faculty of the 
University of Berlin, iirst President of the Ger- 
man Anthropological Association, and founder 
of Cellular Pathology. 

The names of Wundt, Czolbe, Planck, 
Hackel, Schleiden, Carus, Snell, Vierordt, 
Tyndall, Barnard (of Columbia College, New 
York), Bronn, Kolliker, Nagele are also 
among those cited in the controversy. The 
array is an imposing one, and its main weight 
is thrown against Materialism, and with increas- 
ing unity and force. Science is already fulfill- 
ing the grand duty v/hich Scholten says is im- 
posed on her, the duty of repelling the assertion 
that "science is materialistic.'^ ''No possible 
" explanation," says Barnard, '• of mental phe- 



54 INTRODUCTION. 

" nomena can be founded upon a hypothesis 
" which attempts to identify them with physi- 
" cal forces. . . . The organic world furnishes just 
" as conclusive evidence of the existence of an 
" influence superior to force, as the physical 
'' world exhibits of the existence of force itself. 
" ... As physicists, we have nothing to do with 
" mental philosophy. In endeavoring to reduce 
'' the phenomena of mind under the laws of 
" matter we wander beyond our depth, we es- 
'' tablish nothing certain, we bring ridicule 
" upon the name of positive science, and achieve 
"but a single undeniable result, that of unset- 
"tling in the minds of multitudes, convictions 
" which form the basis of their chief happiness. 
'' . . . There is certainly a field which it is not 
" the province of physical science to explore, 
"and which, if we are wise, we shall carefully 
" refrain from invading." 

" I am no materialist," says Huxley, " but, 
" on the contrary, believe Materialism to in- 

" volve grave philosophical error In so far as 

" my study of what specially characterizes the 
" Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein 
"little or nothing of any scientific value, and a 
''great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic 
" to the very essence of science as anything in 
" ultramontane Catholicism. . . . The further sci- 



THE GREAT PHYSICISTS. 55 

" ence advances, the more extensively and con- 
'' sistently will all the phenomena of nature be 
" represented by materialistic formu]£e and sym- 
"bols. But the man of science who, forgetting 
" the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from 
"these formulae and symbols into w^jat is com- 
" monly understood by Materialism, seems to 
'' me to place himself on a level with the mathe- 
" matician who should mistake the x's and y^s, 
" with which he works his problems, for real 
"entities, and with this further disadvantage, 
" as compared w^ith the mathematician, that the 
"blunders of the latter are of no practical con- 
" sequence, w^iile the errors of systematic Ma- 
" terialism may paralyze the energies and de- 
" stroy the beauty of a life.'' 

" The passage from the physics of the brain 
"to the corresponding facts of consciousness," 
says Tyndall, "is unthinkable. ... On both 
"sides of the zone here assigned to the materi- 
"alist he is equally helpless. . . . When we 
" endeavor to pass . . . from the phenomena 
" of physics to those of thought, we meet a 
" problem w^iich transcends any conceivable 
" expansion of the powers w^hich we now pos- 
" sess. We may think over the subject again 
"and again, but it eludes all intellectual pre- 
"sentation. We stand at length face to face 



56 INTRODUCTION. 

" with the Incomprehensible. The territory of 
'' physics is wide, but it has its limits, from 
'^ which we look with vacant gaze into the re- 
*' gion beyond. . . Having exhausted physics, and 
" reached its very rim, the real mystery still 
" looms beyond us. We have, in fact, made 
^^ no step toward its solution. And thus will 
" it ever loom, ever beyond the bound of knowl- 
" edge." 

From these utterances, which are parallel 
wath those given by Ulrioi, from Bonders, and 
Du Bois-Reymond, and which could be multi- 
plied indefinitely, it is very clear that gross in- 
justice may be done to men of science, by con- 
founding their Materialism and Non-theism, in 
(he sphere of physical science^ with a total Mate- 
rialism and Atheism in a different sphere. For 
the physicist, as such, is occupied wholly with 
the question. What does physics prove? and 
not at all with the question. What do other 
sources of knowledge prove ? He knows that 
unproven is not disproven, and that unproven 
by one still less means disproven by all. That 
sort of folly is for the blatant novice who would 
rather talk " big," than talk wisely. The Mate- 
rialist in matter is not of necessity a Materialist 
in mind, and a non-theist in the law may be a 
hearty theist before the law. Physical science, 



THE GREAT PHYSICISTS. 57 

can as such, be neither theistic nor atheistic, for 
physical science is totally occupied with second 
causes, and theism and atheism are alike occu- 
pied with the question of final cause. That is 
a question not of physics but of metaphysics. 
Physics can accumulate the rich stores of mate- 
rial, to which both theist and atheist may resort, 
but in its exclusive sphere it is neither to be 
lauded for the uses made of them bv the one, 
nor condemned for the abuses of them made by 
the other. A l^atural Theology now could be 
made grander than any that has ever been 
written. If the scientist claims the common 
right to use the materials of physics for specu- 
lative purposes, we have to grant it. If in 
doing it, he shows that while in the sphere of 
physics he may be strong, in that of metaphys- 
ics he is weak, we must not condemn him as the 
strong physicist but as the weak metaphysician. 
It is not science but the want of science which 
is at fault. When physical science, the science 
of phenomena and of second causes, not of es- 
sence and ultimate cause, reaches any point, at 
which the next step involves either affirmation 
or denial of a Supreme Cause, it has reached 
its Rubicon. Every step after that is in defiance 
of its own commission, an assumption of author- 
ity that does not belong to it. It is Imperator 



58 INTRODUCTION. 

on its own side, it is Usurper on the other. 
Physical science nia^^ give us Chemistries, Geol- 
ogies, Treatises on Mechanics, but it has no 
right to give us manuals of Ethics, or systems of 
Philosophy or of Theology, though the writers 
of manuals and systems may find rich sugges- 
tions in it for both. 

Much is said in these reviews of the mis- 
chievous spirit and tendency of Strauss's book 
in various aspects, social, political, and relig- 
ious. "We had not reckoned it possible," says 
Rauwenhoff, " that David Priedrich Strauss 
^' should ofier himself as the mouthpiece of a 
" reactionary conservatism like that of Prussia. 
"It is a new illustration of the way in which 
" Skepticism invariably ends in bringing grist 
"to the mill of Absolutism. . . . Strauss comes 
" involuntarily to the deification of the strong 
" arm. Ilis tranquillity in view of the future of 
" the German race, rests on his trust in the rail- 
" itary despotism of Prussia. Goethe and Hum- 
" BOLDT, the heroes of culture and advance, are 
" dead, but, thank Heaven, w^e have in their 
" place Bismarck and Moltkb, the heroes of 
"diplomacy and war! . . . This is a time to 
" press the claim of freedom over against that 
"of statutory regulation, the claim of right 
" over against might, of culture over against mil- 



MISCHIEVOUS TENDENCIES. 59 



cc 



itary despotism. And at this crisis comes this 
" son of Swabia,this independent man of science, 
" this standard-bearer of free thinking — comes 
"with a new programme for state and society, 
" and in this programme he speaks for sound 
'' popular improvement, for freedom of the 
"press, for elementary and higher education, 
" for the moral exaltation of the spirit of the 
"people — not a solitary word; but in place of 
" all these we have a commendation of the old 
" state-policy, under the broad shield of Bis- 
^'MARCK, with the sword of the Empire in his 
" hand, and in the background, as the head- 
" stone of this edifice of state, the scaffold. . . . 
" What good might he have wrought had he 
" employed his power as a writer to cast into 
" the wakened national feeling seeds of the 
"spirit of freedom, of humanity, of civic virtue, 
" of progress in trade and the industrial pur- 
" suits, in science and art ; had he said to his 
"people that as they had once more risen to 
"the first rank among European powers they 
"had new duties to fulfil, that Germany was to 
" show to the world how a great people can wed 
"Freedom to Order, can become the bulwark 
" of the Right, and go forth upon the pathway 
" of a true progress. He might have taught 
" them this. What has he taught them ? I see 



60 INTRODUCTION. 

" but one possible practical application which 
" Germans can make of Strauss's book, and 
"that is to run away from the Church as fast as 
" they can, and find safety from all sorts of 
"perils by creeping under the skirts of the 
" Chancellor of the Empire. 

" Strauss may be a fine thinker, but he has no 
" heart for his own people. No ! and more than 
" this, he has no heart for the people at all. He 
"asks, 'Is Lessing's "Nathan" or Goethe's 
"'"Hermann and Dorothea'' harder to under- 
" ' stand or less replete with the " truths of sal- 
" ' vation," or does it embrace fewer golden sen- 
" ' tences than an Epistle of Paul or one of John's 
"'Discourses of Christ?' Is this sport or ear- 
" nest? When the poor man out of the masses 
" must put away his Bible, and asks for some- 
" thing from which he can draw a word to build 
" up his soul, we are to put in his hands ' Nathan 
"the Wise' and 'Hermann and Dorothea.' 
"Strauss himself could not have the heart to 
" practice what he recommends. Even he must 
" have a suspicion at least, what this Bible, on 
" which he charges so many oflences, means to 
" the simple, pious soul. Understand it ! Alas ! 
" spare yourself the trouble of explaining it if 
"you imagine that your explanation is for the 
" first time to unseal the springs of power in life, 



MISCHIEVOUS TENDENCIES. 61 

"and of courage in death, which this old Scrip- 
" ture word has for the pious poor. You feel 
" an intellectual pride in deciphering the num- 
" ber of the Beast in the Apocalypse ; but think 
"you that the simple Bible-reader has been 
" waiting for your discovery, to dispel the ter- 
" rors of death, in the light of that heavenly Je- 
"rusalem, where God himself shall wipe away 
" all tears from his eyes ? You may explain the 
" train of the connection in the Epistle to the 
" Romans better than Luther could, but with 
" the words ' the righteous shall live by his 
"faith,' Luther broke from the neck of his 
" native land the yoke of superstition. You 
"speak of the classics? Here, too, we have 
" classics, these old Psalmists of Israel, whose 
" sacred poetrj^, though two thousand years 
" have past, wakens the tenderest chords of the 
" human heart. And Jesus — Jesus, whom you 
" call a visionary, a laggard in the development 
" of mind — is he who spake the words, every 
" one of which is felt in the incalculable sum 
"of blessings imparted to our race in all its 
"struggles and sorrows. . . The people is indeed 
" uncultivated, but in some things it has sound 
" feeling, and it would rise in wrath at the at- 
" tempt to substitute, on the wall of the poor 
" cottage room, the head of Goethe for the Head 



62 INTRODUCTION. 

" crowned with thorns, or to put the three well 
'' selected, well arranged quartettes in place of 
'' the old hymns in the Church, sung to the sol- 
" emn cadence of the organ. To attempt it 
" would bring proof that it is one thing to play 
'' the trifler with the old faith, and another and 
" a wholly different one to dislodge it from the 
" hearts and lives of the people. 

"Had Strauss seen much of the life of the 
" people, it is impossible that there should have 
" been no note of sadness at the close of his 
" book, in the contemplation of the loss involved 
" to mankind, were his faith really to supplant 
" the old faith. He could not speak so light- 
-heartedly of man's sense of imperfection, . . of 
" the abandoning of trust in providence, . . of the 
" unsatisfying in life. Could I believe as Strauss 
" believes, I might feel myself bound to utter 
" my convictions, but I think I could not refrain 
'' from tears as I spoke. I should weep at the 
'' thought that there were thousands who would 
" not merely lose what I lost, but who in this 
" loss would see everything vanish, all that 
" touched their life with a brighter hue, all that 
" imparted to its sordidness something of poetry, 
" to its sadness something of consolation. 

"No man can see unmoved, the cynicism 
" which tears away from a child its ideal — and 



THE POLITICAL ELEMENTS IN STRAUSS. 63 

" Strauss ! the people for wliorn thou hast no 
" more than this cynic comfort, this people is 
" but a child, a child of poverty and sorrow." 

HuBER quotes the saying of Mazzini that 
''the doctrine of Materialism is the philosophy 
" of all epochs which are withering to the grave, 
"and of all nations sinking to extinction." 
" We dare not allow," says Ruber, at the close 
of his book, '• the spirit of the idealistic philos- 
" ophy to be lost, if we are to have any guaran- 
" tee of a great and happy future for our native 
"land." 



THE POLITICAL ELEMENTS EST STRAUSS. 

Strauss has had an extraordinary felicity in 
disgusting men of both the great political ten- 
dencies. The Conservatives are disgusted with 
his destructivism of principles, and the Progres- 
sives with his heartless sj'cophancy to the ruling 
powers, in practice. He lays the foundation of 
a Red Republic, and builds upon it a structure 
of absolute Despotism. Neither party is satis- 
fied with either part. The Red Republicans 
abhor the foundation, for it is made the founda- 
tion for monarchy. The Monarchists abhor the 
structure, for it is made to rest on the quick- 
sands of the most ultra infidelity, which they 



64 INTRODUCTION. 

know demoralizes the people, and gives terrible 
power to the dangerous classes. Each class 
abhors the thing they would, because it is bound 
up with the thing they would not. 

H. Lang, " the radical of radicals, and one of 
Strauss's most fervent admirers," expresses the 
disappointment he had experienced in reading 
his last book. "Rarely," says he, "have my 
" anticipations proved so empty, as on the read- 
ying of this book. To be sure it contains not 
'' a few things which are suggestive and beau- 
"tifully put, but as a whole it disgusted me; 
" it was pervaded by such an air of senility, 
"an aristocratic daintiness, thrusting out of 
" sight the real forces of life, a sort of dis- 
" agreeable sourness and crabbedness, when I 
"looked for that repose of unprejudiced esti- 
" mate, which is the token of a wise man." 

" Our author," says Rauweniioff, " is a 
" criminalist of the old style. He laughs at all 
" the twaddle about humanity and the rights of 
" men. He huzzaed for the laws against tlie 
"Jesuits; he went in for a summary taking of 
" the people of the International over the 
" border, and he sighs at the thought how many 
"are likely to give the gallows the slip." 

" It is worthy of note," says Miciielis, " how 
" anxiousl^^ Strauss regards the probability of 



REACTIONARY TENDENCY OF STRAUSS's BOOK. 65 



"ail outbreak of savagery in the world of the 
" new faith, and how desirous he is to restore or 
" preserve all the means of coercive restraint. 
" The death-penalty is to be retained and made 
" more general (though Strauss nowhere has a 
"place for the element of expiation for guilt). 
" The right of voting is to be restricted, the 
" right of mutual association on the part of 
" workingmen is to be abrogated. lie is a 
" friend of nobility, monarchy, war, and, as a 
" matter of course, standing armies. What in- 
" fatuation ! As if everything of that sort would 
" not bend like willow-twigs, or be torn up by 
"the roots, like pines, when the hurricane 
"breaks loose, which is sure to come, if the 
"people should ever reach Strauss's convic- 
" tions, and act them out in earnest.'' 



THE REACTIONARY TENDENCY OF STRAUSS'S BOOK. 

Of the tendency of the book by reaction^ the 
general opinion of the reviewers is that ex- 
pressed by Sporri : " Anxious souls, when they 
" see themselves reduced to the alternative of 
" choosing between the Church-faith intact, and 
" the results here oftered, may be seized with 
" terror at all criticism, and throw themselves 
" into the arms of orthodoxy ; or, taking warn- 



66 INTRODUCTION. 

" ing from Strauss, that they cannot stand fast 
" by the Protestant orthodoxy, nor even by that 
" of the Old Catholics, may find themselves 
" guided in the straight path to Rome. Of those 
" who have been standing in an attitude of indif- 
'^ ference to the Church and to Christianity, and 
" who will clap their hands, there is a large class 
" with whom it will not be pleasant for Strauss 
" to be associated. Others, thoughtful of the 
'*• welfare of the people, will continue to com- 
" mend othodox}^ as the only proper diet for 
" the masses, with the understanding, however, 
'' that they are not to be expected to partake of 
" this nutriment themselves." " On many a 
" reader, however, this book may have an effect 
" like that which the philosophy of Schopen- 
" HAUER had on Strauss. It may produce in 
" such a reader a reaction against this whole 
" method of treating the Christian religion, and 
" may recall to him the secret threads which 
" still bind him to Christianity." 

Of the provision for an effectual antidote to 
Strauss's book, Rauwexhoff says, at the end 
of his discussion : " Strauss's style of thinking 
" is a power which-is not to be vanquished by 
" anathemas, or by critical processes. The sole 
" power before which it must give way is the 
^' power of a religion, which, without impairing 



ULEIcfs REVIEW OF STEAUSS. 67 

" in any respect the just claims of science, and 
" without bringing any derangement into the 
'> natural unfolding of social life, shall permeate 
" every part of our human existence with its 
" sanctifying and quickening might." 

TJLRICI'S REVIEW OF STRAUSS. 

Distinguished among the numerous reviews 
of Strauss is the Criticism contributed by Ul- 
Rici to the "Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic und 
Philosophische Kritik.'' 

Dr. Hermann Ulrici (born 1806), Professor 
of Philosophy in the University of Halle, is 
known to English readers by the translation of 
his work on the Dramatic Art of Shakspeare, 
London, 1846. He has written other works on 
Literary History and Criticism ; but the great 
strength of his life has been put into works of 
which the English public knows little, but of 
which it would be a great gain to it to know 
much. To all students of the best philosophical 
writings of living German authors, Ulrici is 
known as the author of a number of works 
which show a rare mastery of the physical and 
metaphysical sciences; works which are models 
of logical thinking and of noble style. He is 
not an ambitious novice, pulling himself into 



68 INTRODUCTION. 

notice by dragging at the skirts of a celebrity 
of the hour; but is a man who, in the best 
elements of true renown, is Strauss's superior. 
Ulrici is not a theologian, and does not write 
from a theological point of view. For the im- 
mediate moral force and efiectiveness of the 
review we translate, this is an advantage. It 
anticipates the very pitiful but very common 
pretence, by which the school of loose thinkers 
conveniently sets aside a work from the hand of 
one whose life business it is to defend the great 
principles of a pure Theism. They solve his 
defence by insisting that he makes it only be- 
cause it is his business. The very men who 
under the pretence of physical theory, are little 
more than uncalled dabblers in theology, of 
whose primary principles they show themselves 
too ignorant even to misrepresent them effec- 
tively, make an outcry against the theologian 
as an intruder into other men's province — their 
province — when, however modestly and ably, he 
defends revealed truth against pseudo-scientilic 
assumption. In Ulrici we have a great phil- 
osophical thinker, deciding by the processes of 
a sober, logical philosophy the claim which 
Strauss was most ambitious to establish for 
himself, the claim to be a rational thinker. It 
is a claim with the fall of which his book falls. 



ULEICl's REVIEW OF STRAUSS. 69 

The confutation of Strauss's philosophy is the 
conipletest confutation of what is most impor- 
tant in his " new faith/' If in this he is not a 
philosophical thinker, he is nothing. In the 
album of the Crown Princess of Prussia, the 
year before his death (he died February 9th, 
1874), Strauss wrote : " Though the wise and 
" honored refuse me a place among them, I 
" shall not complain, if I be but reckoned with 
" the rational Whatever be the place of 
Strauss in the judgment of after generations, 
it will surely not be with " the rational,'' if the 
rational are those who have used the highest 
reason in the service of the purest truth. 

Ulrici's review shows his characteristic abil- 
ity. It is a masterpiece of logic, fact, and 
practical force. It is clear and cogent, compact 
yet comprehensive. Letting Strauss speak for 
himself, both in statement and argument, it 
meets him calmly and answers him overwhelm- 
ingly. Strauss is fond of the weapons of ridi- 
cule, but he is no master in the use of them, 
but he provokes sarcasm in reply, less by his 
feeble, and sometimes coarse wit, than by his 
ineffable, self-satisfied absurdity. In his worst 
displays of this sort he cannot be burlesqued, he 
can only be exhibited. Ulrici's review never 

3 



70 INTRODUCTION. 

makes Strauss ridiculous^; that it shows him so, 
is Strauss's own fault. 

Every one desires to know what Strauss held 
and why he held it, but very many have not the 
time or the inclination to read his book. Every 
one should wish to know how Strauss is over- 
thrown on the very ground he has selected for 
his battle. Few, however, have access to the 
ampler works which have been written in reply 
to him, and few would have time or desire to 
read them, if they had. As warfare grows 
older, battles become shorter. In modern tac- 
tics the demonstrated ability to do a thing often 
makes it unnecessary to do it. To pierce the 
centre makes the beating of the wings a mere 
matter of detail, and in Ulrici's review Strauss's 
centre is annihilated. His wings are not worth 
saving, and not worth beating. 

This volume, then, is enough for its end. It 
is a discussion, scientific, yet perfectly intelli- 
gible to every educated reader, of all the most 
vital of the speculative questions of the day. 
It furnishes one of the best antidotes to the 
widely circulated and dangerous book of 
Strauss, the weaknesses and internal contradic- 
tions of which it lays bare. To the general 
reader, as well as to the man of science, to all 
who are in the perils or doubts of Materialism, 



ULRICI'S REVIEW OF STRAUSS. 71 

Ulrici's " Eeview of Strauss," rich in matter 
and classic in execution, yet small in bulk, will 
be invaluable. It shows how necessary and great 
a part is borne by true philosophical thinking 
in the confutation of the false. If Germany 
gives to the world the ablest presentations of 
the wrong, she also furnishes the noblest vindi- 
cations of the right. 

FiCHTE says of Ulrici's review, " With such 
" keenness of logic, such inexorable sequence of 
" conclusion, has it laid bare the internal con- 
" tradictions, the hastiness of inference, the un- 
" sustained assumption, which reveal themselves 
"in the particular parts as well as in the gen- 
" eral position of Strauss's book, as to place be- 
" yond all doubt the final judgment in regard to 
^' its philosophical vsiiue.'^ Nippold says: ''To 
" consider it necessary to say a single word in 
''regard to Ulrici's significance in the devel- 
" opment of the modern philosophy, would be 
" as absurd as the attempt to ignore a Lotze or 
" a Trendlenburg. His judgment on Strauss, 
" as a philosophical thinker, cuts with an al- 
" most unsurpassable acuteness." " Any one 
"who will recall," says another German re- 
viewer, " the haughty self-sufficiency with which 
" Strauss has been making his appeal to ' phi- 
"losoph}^,' meaning the Hegelian, as if there 



72 INTRODUCTION. 

'' were no other, and pleasing himself with the 
"idea of being a philosopher, will readily iin- 
" derstand, why among all the writings in oppo- 
'' sition to his book, that of Ulrici must most 
" deeply cut to the quick his gigantic vanity/' 

In the translation, Ulrici's notes have been 
incorporated into the text, but are distinguished 
by square brackets. The various subdivisions 
of his discussion have been numbered and fur- 
nished with headings. All his citations of 
Strauss have been carefully verified. Where 
Strauss has made a change in the later edi- 
tions, the change is noted, and the paging of 
the sixth edition is added to that of the edi- 
tion used by Ulrici. The Introduction has 
been designed to give a general view of the 
Materialism of our da}^, and a special presenta- 
tion of the most important points in the contro- 
versy raised by the book of Strauss. Many of 
the strongest and most brilliant things which 
have been called forth in the reviews of Strauss 
are brought together, and, w^ithlJLRici's critique, 
will help to make the volume an epitome of the 
great points in discussion. It will aid the 
reader who desires to be brought fully abreast 
with the results and questions of the latest in- 
vestigation and speculation of our day. 



ULRICrS REVIEW OF STRAUSS: 

''THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW EAITH." 



L 

STRAUSS CONSIDERED AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THENTKER. 

David Friedrich Strauss is a celebrity. All 
bis works bave run tbrougb so and so many 
editions. Tbe most important of tbem belong 
to tbe department of Tbeology, or, to speak 
more accurately, to tbe department of tbe Pbil- 
osopby of Religion. It is a matter of interest, 
tberefore, even to tbe pbilosopber by profession, 
wben a man like Strauss comes fortb in tbe 
evening of bis life witb a confession of bis faitb. 
Our interest, bowever, in tbis direction is, as 
a matter of course, confined to tbe question, 
Wbat are tbe pbilosopbical grounds — wbat is 
tbe pbilosopbical tenableness of tbis new faitb? 
Tbe question wbetber Strauss is rigbt or wrong, 
or bow far be may be rigbt or wrong, in bis way 
of apprebending tbe origin, development, signifi- 
cance, trutb or untrutb of bistorical Cbristianity, 



74 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

and of the doctrines of the Church, is a question 
of a purely theological character, with which we 
have here nothing to do. We are interested solely 
in Strauss as a "philosophical thinker. We have 
read his book, simply because we felt warranted 
in the assumption, that a philosopher who had 
reached the distinguished position held by 
Strauss among scientific writers, would mean 
by the faith to which he gives his adherence 
something more than his mere individual faith, his 
subjective view or conviction. Such a faith could 
inspire very little interest in our mind. We 
assumed that this new faith would be offered 
and argued, philosophicallj^, as a form and appre- 
hension of religion objectively justified. In this 
expectation we have been grievously disappoint- 
ed. We find, on the contrary, that the "new 
faith'^ is utterly destitute of any philosophical 
foundation. In fact we are forced to the con- 
viction, that the book before us very closely re- 
sembles a philosophical bankrupt's statement on 
the part of its renowned author. 

This conviction of ours, which to the mass of 
the admirers of Strauss and of the disciples of 
the new faith, may seem supremely paradoxical, 
and supremely heretical, we have made it our 
task thoroughly to vindicate, and we are not 
without hope of being able to do it. 



"the new faith and the old faith/^ 75 

We lay down as a rule or criterion the prin- 
ciple, that a philosopher, who on essential points 
not only puts forth as established truths asser- 
tions which are completely without evidence, 
and wholly untenable, but contradicts himself 
again and again, has no claim to be called a 
philosopher. The validity of the principle will 
be granted by every philosopher, and, it is to be 
hoped, by all who claim to be a part of what is 
called the cultivated class. 



II. 

what STRAUSS PROPOSES IN "THE NEW FAITH AND 
THE OLD faith:" HIS REAL AIM THE DESTRUC- 
TION OF THE OLD FAITH. 

At an early stage of the discussion Strauss 
explains what he means, and what he does not 
mean by the '' we," in whose name he speaks. 
"We do not involve in our plan any changes at 
'^ all, for the time, in the outside world. We 
" do not dream of overthrowing any of the 
"churches, for we know that to innumerable 
"persons a church is still a necessity. It does 
" not seem to us that the time has yet come even 
"for a new construction — not the construction 
"of a church, but, after the church has crum- 
" bled into final ruin, the construction of a new 



76 STBAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

" organization of the ideal elements in the vari- 
*'ous forms of national life. Nor would we 
" merely patch and vamp up the old structures, 
"for in such a course we see only a repression 
'' of the process of formation. We can only 
"work in stillness, so that in the future some- 
" thing new may shape itself out of that disin- 
" tegration of the old, which must inevitably 
" come."*^ 

This means, then, that Strauss has taken up 
his pen not for the new organization of the ideal 
elements in the life of nations — for the time has 
not come for that — but only for the future self- 
evolution of something new, out of the inevitable 
disintegration of the old. But this " new,'' if it 
involve faith and religion, can consist only in a 
new formation of the " ideal elements in the 
forms of national life," and these are the only 
things on which it is possible to work, if we are 
to organize them anew. In the sphere of the 
ideal, organization is but a substitute, a more 
pregnant word for formation ; and not in the 
future, but in the present only can we work /or 
the future. This is a problem then for whose 
solution the time has not come, for whose solu- 
tion, therefore, it is impossible to work, and 

* Der Alt. u. Neu. Glaub. Sechst. Aufl. 1873, p. 8. 



^^THE NEW FAITH AND THE OLD FAITH/^ 77 

this is the solution on which Strauss goes to 
work. This work he proposes to do "in still- 
ness;^^ and to accomplish this end, he publishes 
books, which he no doubt expects and wishes 
may find a hearty response. 

The "new,'' which he has in his eye, is some- 
thing which is to form " itself of itself ^^^ but he is 
going to " work'' so that it may form itself. He 
proposes then to work for something which has 
no need of his co-working, and which can be ad- 
vantaged by his work, either not at all, or only 
so far as his work prepares the ground by reliev- 
ing it of rubbish and levelling it — in a word, by 
a complete removal of the old. But this, it 
seems, is not the purpose of his work, for he 
" does not dream of overthrowing any of the 
churches." But as in this declaratory act one 
statement is all the time contradicting another, 
we are, at the very outstart, left standing in 
hopeless perplexity before the question : What 
is Strauss really aiming at ? What was his pre- 
cise object in writing and publishing his book? 

In the course of his discussion, indeed, we 
are not long left in ignorance as to what he pur- 
poses, and as to what he is doing. It is very 
speedily apparent, in spite of his protestation to 
the contrary, that he has no definite aim beyond 
the destruction of the old. This is rendered 



78 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

very clear, in part, by his elaborate assaults not 
only upon the orthodox apprehension of Chris- 
tianity, bnt upon every other, even the free or 
rationalistic view. It is clear, also, from the 
fact that the new, with which he would fill up 
the empty space, and which he styles '' The 
Modern View of the World," is at bottom noth- 
ing new, and nothing at all positive, but is the 
pure negation of faith, as it is a downright re- 
pudiation of all the "ideal elements" of our 
human estate — it is nothing more than naked 
atheism and materialism. 



III. 
''are we still christians?" 

Into that polemic, as we have already said, we 
do not design to enter. We commit to theolo- 
gians the answer to the question. What was the 
teaching of Christ, can we understand it, and 
what is its meaning? We pass over, therefore, 
the entire first part of the book, bearing the 
superscription, "Are we still Christians?" It 
needs no such discussion to make it clear that 
this is a question, the answer to which every one 
will determine at his own pleasure. Whether 
Strauss does, or does not regard himself as a 
Christian, is in itself of no consequence at all, 



"have we religion still?" 79 

so far as the interests of Christianty are in- 
volved. To be sure, he declares it impossible 
that a cultivated man should profess 'the Chris- 
tian religion, but that amounts to nothing, so 
long as the actual existence of such men fur- 
nishes the direct confutation of the asserted im- 
possibility. It does not follow, therefore, that 
because "we'' are no longer Christians, Chris- 
tianity must "inevitably" go to the ground. 

IV. 

"have we religion still ?" 

After responding in the negative to his own 
first question, Strauss goes on to a second one: 
"Have we religion still?" He introduces it 
with a "glance at the rise and early develop- 
ment of religion in the human race." As we 
know nothing historically m regard to the "rise" 
and ''earliest" development of religion, the 
glance which Strauss casts on it is of course 
philosophical, and his opinion on the matter, to 
have any value at all, must be philosophically 
(psychologically) confirmed. In place, however, 
of any confirmation, and in place of all further 
investigation, he decides the question in ad- 
vance in the sense of atheism. He asserts that 
"Hume is certainly justified in maintaining that 



80 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL, THINKER. 

"it has not been the disinterested impulse to- 
"ward the attainment of knowledge and truth, 
"but the thoroughly selfish impulse toward 
"well-being, which originally led men to re- 
"ligion, and that the disagreeable far more 
"than the pleasant has been operative as religi- 
"ous motive. The Epicurean derivation of re- 
"ligion from fear, has in it something indis- 
"putably correct. If everything went as man 
"wishes it, if he always had what he needs, did 
"his plans never miscarry, and were he not 
"schooled by painful experiences, to look forth 
"sadly on the future, it is hardly probable that 
"the idea of a superior Being (in the religious 
"sense) would ever be aroused in him. He 
"would have thought, it must be as it is, and 
"would have accepted it in stolid indifier- 
" ence."* Thereupon he gives us quite a pretty, 
almost poetical picture of the life of nature as 
it is led by men in their earliest period, just as 
they spring from the bosom of nature. This is 
done to show us how under the influence of 
fear, they come to personify the powers of 
nature, and to make their gods out of them. 
With this the question in its preliminary stage 
is finished up. It is certainly a pity, that this 

* Alt. u. Neu. Glaub., p. 93, Sechs. Aufl. 96. 



^^HAVE WE RELIGION STILL ?'^ 81 

picture, which is meant to supply the place 
of an argument, is nothing more than poetry, 
in fact is simply fiction. To this hour the 
child personifies the inanimate things which are 
around it, but not from fear. It just as freely 
personifies objects which it associates with 
friendliness and goodness, as those which seem 
to be enemies, and excite its fears. Everything 
whose eflfects it experiences, it regards as a 
living being, endowed with soul, and will, and 
activity. The reason of this is, that it has thus 
far known no other operation than a personal 
one, no other cause than that activity which 
goes forth from willing and wishing, and yet, 
in virtue of that law of causality, which uncon- 
sciously and involuntarily controls its thinking, 
it finds itself necessitated to assume that there 
is a cause for everything which happens to it. 
If it alwavs went with man as he wishes, if he 
always had what he needs, if no plan miscarried, 
in short if, as the proverb phrases it, roasted 
pigeons flew into his mouth, it is quite possible 
that he would accept the situation ''with stolid 
indifterence," like cattle grazing in the pastures. 
But then under these circumstances he would 
probabl}^ not have been man at all, would have 
formed no plans, would have had no question- 
ings touching the future, would not have 



82 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

troubled himself about the nature of things, the 
grounds aijd causes of events, and topics of a 
similar sort, but, in "stolid indifference," resign- 
ing himself to the perceptions of the senses, and 
the pleasures of sense, would have passed his 
days, like the cattle in grassy meadows. It is 
not then fear alone which is the immediate source 
of religion. With it is associated the question 
after the causes of phenomena, the causes of the 
good and evil events in nature. Rising as it 
does involuntarily, having its spring in the 
very depths of man's nature, forcing itself on 
him in the natural events and natural conditions 
of his own being, it is this question which makes 
man man, it is this which announces him to be 
man, and this question is part of the immediate 
source of religion. It is because he conceives of 
the operations, as operations or manifestations of 
a superior power, that he is overwhelmed with a 
feeling unknown to the animal, the feeling of 
dependence, and of conditioned being. This in- 
vests his fears and hopes with intelligent consci- 
ousness ;hy\i he reaches the conception of a power 
reigning beyond him, and above him, revealing 
itself sometimes as his friend, sometimes as his 
foe. And as he, like the child, knows up to 
this period no other operation than that which 
is personal, proceeding from will, acting in ac- 



"have we eeligion still ?^' 83 

corclance with aim and purpose, he personifies 
the potencies of nature, which are made known 
in their various activities, and not alone with 
fear and shrinking, but also with love and hope, 
regards them as superior beings. For it is an 
arbitrary, groundless assertion, that the earliest, 
the primal deities were exclusively gods of fear 
and terror. In all the grades of religious develop- 
ment, even the very lowest, we find that there 
were good and beneficent deities, as well as evil 
and inimical ones. In some instances there were 
none but good deities, in no case were there evil 
ones only. The mental law of causalitj^, the no- 
tion of cause, the consciousness of dependence and 
limitation, demands not only the conception but 
the acceptance and admission of an ultimate 
supreme cause, a cause which is not the mere 
operation of another cause. This conception of 
the conditioned is only possible when we dis- 
tinguish the conditioned from the conditioning, 
and the conditioning, in and of itself, purely 
as conditioning, is necessarily unconditioned. 
Hence throughout, wherever a development of 
religion takes place, the religious consciousness 
shapes itself into a faith in the existence of a 
supreme, unconditioned, absolute cause, which 
as such must be one only, must be self-deter- 



84 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

mining, and must consequently be a spiritual 
force and activity. 



STRATJSS'S THEORY OF THE RISE OF RELIGION. 

All we have urged has often enough been set 
forth in sharp, logical demonstration. Strauss 
ignores the whole of it. To him " monothe- 
ism " is the result of the " life of a horde " shut 
up in itself. It is in itself no witness of a 
higher training of the religious consciousness, 
but just as the case may be, it is higher or 
lower than the developed polytheism, of the 
Greeks for example. He clings so closely to his 
principle of fear, that he brings it even into the 
ethical elements of religion : " The further to 
"wit a people advances in civilization, the less 
"does it restrict its view to nature, whether in 
"her terrors or in her blessings, and the more 
" does human life, with its various relations, 
" come to be regarded as a momentous matter. 
"And in the lives of men, the larger the pro- 
"portion of insecurity and hazard, the greater 
" the dependence on circumstances, the more 
"unavailing human aid appears, the more co- 
" gently does man feel the need of assuming 

powers in affinity with his own being, whom 



u 



STRAUSS'S THEORY OF THE RISE OF RELIGION. 85 



a 



a 



" he can approach with his wishes and petitions. 
" At this point the moral nature of man comes 
" in as a co-operative factor. Man desires to be 
protected not only against the passions of 
' others, but would have his own loftier striv- 
ing guarded against the powers of his own 
"sensual nature, for back of the demands of 
" his own conscience, he phxces (by way of sup- 
" port) a Deity endowed with the authority to 
" command. ''"^ What an amazinsjlv odd crea- 
ture man is to be sure! For the sake of his 
sensual well-being, he transforms the powers of 
nature into deities, who, by prayers, gifts, offer- 
ings and things of the sort, are led to favor him 
and to change their minds, and then he fur- 
nishes these very same deities with mandatory 
power against his sensual appetites and selfish 
will ! Though the will, the arbitrary volition of 
the bad man is a thoroughly internal act, which 
has no reference at all to his outward natural 
life, and tlue forces of nature which condition it, 
he involves himself in this contradiction without 
noticing that it is a contradiction, and that in so 
doing he does nothing more than impose upon 
himself! And stranger still: in this illusion, 
this offspring of a terrified imagination, he has 

^ Alt. u. N. Glaub. 57, Sechst. Aufl. 100, 101. 



86 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

such a firm faith, that for its sake he endures 
the sorest sufiferings, and joyously submits to 
death itself, though he has invented the whole 
thing only for the sake of his bodily earthly 
well-being ! 

VI. 

STRAUSS'S REPUDIATION OF THE ARGUMENT FOR THE 
EXISTENCE OF GOD. 

If faith in God be no more than the contra- 
dictory result of human fear, it can, of course, 
furnish no proof of the existence of God. 
Strauss repeats therefore the old assertion, 
often enough refuted, that what is stjded the 
cosmological proof is false, inasmuch as it leads 
us beyond the world to a cause distinct from it- 
From the fact '' that every particular being in 
" the world has its ground in another particular 
" being, which is again related in the same way 
" to another," it does not follow, he argues, 
" that the totality of individual things has its 
'Aground in one being who is not in a similar 
" relation, a being which, unlike the rest, has 
" not its ground in another, but in itself." That 
would be an inference, he argues, lacking all 
internal coherence, and destitute of all conclu- 
siveness. Rather, "If each of the things in the 



STRAUSS^S REPUDIATION, ETC. 87 

"world has its ground in another, and so on 
"forever, we do not reach the conception of a 
" cause whose operation would be the world, 
" but of a substance whose accidents are the 
" particular beings in the world : we do not 
" reach a God, but a universe, resting on itself, 
"abiding in its uniformity amid the eternal 
" shifting of phenomena."* Strauss confounds 
the notion of causality with the menial law of 
causality! The notion of causality may allow, 
at least by the aid of some plausible twistings 
and turnings, of being transmuted into the no- 
tion of substantiality, and this is what Strauss 
has done. But with the menial law of causality 
this is simply impossible. When an operation 
takes place — an event, a process, a change — that 
law compels us to assume a cause distinct from the 
eflect, even where we cannot tell what the cause 
is. The cause must be disiinct from the effect, 
otherwise there would be no twofoldness, there 
w^ould not be cause and eflect, there would be 
only identity, and consequently there would be 
no cause. In virtue of this mental law, we can- 
not conceive of an endless series of causes and 
eftects — which is in itself a process of thinking 
which is incapable of being carried out — bat we 



* P. 113, Sechst. Aufl. 116. 



88 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

ave forced to presuppose a cause, which is not in 
turn the mere effect of another, but which is 
pure, ultimate, and consequently unconditioned 
cause. On any other supposition we would 
have effects onli/^ and no causes; but effect with- 
out cause is inconceivable. This purely uncon- 
ditioned cause is distinguished from all things 
in the world, not in that "it has its ground in 
itself," but in the very fact that it is the cause 
of the world : it has no ground and no cause 
whatever, but it is the cause of all beside, it is 
the only true cause. For the law of causality 
does not afBrm that all that exists must have 
a cause, but only that all that is effected or pro- 
duced, all that happens, all that comes into 
being, must have a cause. Inasmuch as this is 
a universal mental law it never occurs to the 
unprejudiced, unsophisticated understanding to 
doubt its universal validity. It is only a sort of 
reflection ruled by a particular tendency, soph- 
istic, and tangling itself in its self-manufactured 
notions and assumptions, which makes the at- 
tempt to rid itself of this law, and thus plunges 
itself deeper and deeper into contradictions and 
absurdities. This is precisely the case with 
Strauss. A universe " resting on itself" is an 
absurdity, for the universe does not " rest," and 
as a " universe " can have no basis, neither in 



STRAUSS^S REPUDIATION, ETC. 89 

something else — for if there were something 
apart from it it would be no universe — nor in 
itself, for a basis which bears the existent nature 
in itself, and is itself the nature it bears, is like 
the pig-tail of Baron Munchausen, by which 
he held himself dangling in the air. And a 
universe " abiding in its uniformity amid the 
eternal shifting of phenomena ^' is a contra- 
diction in the adjective, because that which 
changes does not remain uniform^ and because a 
changing phenomenon, which has not in it an 
essence which puts forth the phenomenon, and 
changes with it, is no phenomenon, but an 
empty illusion. This alternation, this rising 
and passing away of the phenomena, moreover, 
must have a cause, and the cause must be dif- 
ferent from its effect. This phenomenal uni- 
verse therefore — the onlj' one we know — must 
have a cause distinct from itself. 

In a similar style Strauss conducts his con- 
futation of the teleological proof of the exist- 
ence of God. He concedes indeed that the uni- 
verse, or, as it is now the fashion to call it, the 
substance of the world, " manifests itself in an 
" infinite alternation of phenomena linked to- 
" gether not only causally, but with reference to 
" a common end."* But " nature herself teaches 

* 114, Sechst. Aufl. 117. 



90 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKEK. 

" US that it is an erroneous assumption that 
" nothing but conscious intelligence can produce 
'' that which shows adaptation to an end.'' "As 
" in the case of animal instinct, for example, 
" something takes place, which looks as if it 
" were done in accordance with a conscious aim, 
"and yet really is done without any such aim, 
"so is it with the productions of nature.''* 
" How it comes that this illusive appearance 
" arises, or that anything conformable to an aim 
"takes place, and yet takes place without any 
"preconceived conscious aim, is a riddle to 
" which Darwin. has given a brilliant solution, 
" and in so doing has, to the mind of every man 
" of scientific culture, done away with all Tele- 
"ology." To the authentication of this point, 
however, Strauss does not come at once, but 
prepares the way for it, by a critique of the no- 
tion of God, in the recent philosophy, by a con- 
futation of the proofs of the immortality of the 
soul, and by further discussions in regard to the 
nature of religion. He then goes on to present 
a summary of the results of science with refer- 
ence to the formation of the world, and the 
origin of life on our globe. We propose to fol- 
low him in this direction, to give his argument 

* Sechst. Aufl. 118. 



IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 91 

all the force he may claim for it. We shall pass 
by the critical portions only, regarding it as a 
matter of supererogation to subject to review 
this criticism of his, the superficiality of which 
no one familiar with the latest philosophy will 
need to have demonstrated. 



VII, 

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 

That Strauss should regard faith in immor- 
tality as a superstition is a matter of course. 
It is only a logical necessity that the denial of 
God should involve the denial of the immortal- 
ity of the soul. It is also involved in the nature 
of the case, that there are not and cannot be 
" evidences'^ of the immortality of the soul, so 
rigid as to make its rejection impossible. None 
the less does Strauss demand this sort of evi- 
dence. The result is that he discovers that the 
evidences hitherto given — the weakest of which 
he carefully selects, ignoring the stronger ones 
— have no cogency. But in doing this he is 
simply guilty once more of confounding distinct 
notions. When evidences are so rigid as to 
make rejection impossible, we call the result 
knowledge; and that we have, in this sense, a 
knowledge of the immortality of the soul, no 



92 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

sober pbilosophical thinker has ever pretended. 
The question here at issue is that oi faith in im- 
mortality. Faith must indeed be able to sustain 
itself by good objective reasons, or it would be 
nothing more than a subjective opinion, or a 
superstition. But there are reasons sufficient 
to justify it which are nevertheless not coercive 
evidences, because doubts and exceptions may 
be urged against them, the W' eight of which de- 
pends upon the subjectivity of the individual, 
into the balance of which they are cast. Only 
on this account is it faith, not knowledge. Such 
reasons there are, and they stand fast, despite 
Strauss's confutation ; some of them in fact he 
has not touched at all, [That Strauss should 
make no reference to the arguments for the im- 
mortality of the soul w^hich I have grouped to- 
gether in my book, " God and Nature,''* is 
nothing more than was to be expected. The 
renow^ned critic confines himself, as a matter of 
course, to the renowned old philosophers.] 

VIII. 

THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION. 

Strauss closes his diatribe against faith in 
immortality in w^ords ^vhich sum up his prin- 

^ Gott und die Natur, 2 Aufl. 330 seq. 



THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION. 93 

ciple: "Nothing is immaterial except that 
which is not at all."* After that we might 
expect that to his second question, "Have we 
religion still ?" he would return as downright a 
negative as he has given to the first. Material- 
ists, at least, who are consistent with their prin- 
ciples, have constantly denied religion, uncon- 
ditionally and in every aspect. Strauss is not 
ready for that. He begins once more his search 
into " the essential character " of religion. He 
justifies Schleiemacher's derivation of religion 
from the feeling of absolute dependence. But 
he also discovers that " Feuerbach is rio'ht in 
"saying: The origin, in fact tlie very essence 
" of religion is desire. Had man no desires he 
"would have no gods. What man desires to 
" be, but is not, he makes into his god ; what 
" he would like to have, but cannot secure for 
"himself, his god is to secure for him. It is 
" not, therefore, simplj^ the dependence in which 
" he finds himself, but the need also of counter- 
" acting it, of setting himself over against it, in 
" freedom once more, from which religion arises 
"among men.^'f At an earlier point in his ar- 
gument Strauss approves of the Epicurean the- 

* Alt. u. Neu. Gl. Sechst. Aufl. 134 
t P. 153, Sechst. Aufl. 137. 



94 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

cry, that fear is the mother of religion. Now 
he approves of Feuerbach's theory that the ori- 
gin and the very essence of religion is desire. 
Are we to understand by this that the dread of 
hunger and want is identical with the desire of 
man to be what his god is, or what he imagines 
his god to be ? And is this desire capable of 
being harmonized \vith the feeling of absolute 
dependence ? Is it not a contradiction in the 
adjective, first to depress man to the level of the 
animal, w^ho lives and cares only for the gratifi- 
cation of the wants of the senses, and then to 
take this very same being, man, in the very same 
relation, to wit, in the relation to religion, and 
endow him with the desire for a loftier being, 
the desire for divine perfection, power and free- 
dom ? Is it not just as contradictory to devise 
the very same phenomenon from two sources 
which are diametrically opposite — the feeling of 
dependence, and the need of freedom ? As- 
suredly if man hides w^ithin him antitheses like 
these, if man have this duality of nature, he 
cannot be put upon the same plane W'ith the 
rest of beings. 



THE PERMANENT IN RELIGION, ETC. 95 



IX. 

THE PERMANENT IN RELIGION. MAN, AND THE 
UNIVERSE. 

To the acknowledgment of this Strauss him- 
self is finall}^ brought. He allows religion to 
stand as a distinguishing mark of human nature 
in its essential character. Only, " religion with 
us is no longer what it was with our fathers.^' 
It no longer involves faith in the existence of a 
God, and faith in the immortality of the soul. 
Its origin, and its essence is rather a "recog- 
nition of the universe," though it be but of a 
very narrow part of it. " We perceive in the 
''world a restless alternation. In this alterna- 
"tion, however, we soon discover something 
" permanent, we discover order and law. We 
" perceive in nature violent antitheses, and fear- 
" ful conflicts ; but we find that the existence 
" and unison of the whole is not destroyed by 
" them, but is, on the contrary, preserved. We 
" perceive further a graduation, a development 
" of the higher from the lower, of the delicate 
" from the coarse, of the mild from the harsh. 
" We find, besides, that we are, ourselves, ad- 
" vanced both in our personal and social life in 
"proportion as we succeed in subjecting to 



96 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

" rule what is arbitrarily shifting within us and 
" around us, in proportion as from the lower, 
" we develop the higher, from the harsh develop 
" the tender. To this sort of things, when we 
" encounter it in the circle of human life, we 
" give the name, rational and good. What we 
" perceive in correspondence with it in the world 
" around us we cannot help calling by the same 
" names. And as, besides, we feel ourselves ab- 
" solutely dependent on this world, as we derive 
" our existence and the controlling influence of 
" our being from it alone, we are compelled to 
" regard it in its total notion, or as the universe, 
" as also the primal source of all that is rational 
" and good. From the fact that the rational and 
''good in the human race proceeds from con- 
" sciousness and will, the old religion drew the 
"inference, that whatever we find in the broad 
"world correspondent with these qualities must 
" also have proceeded from a conscious and 
" voluntary author. We have abandoned this 
" sort of syllogism ; w^e no longer regard the 
" world as the work of an absolute, rational, 
"and beneficent person, but as the working- 
" place of the rational and the good. It is to 
" our view no longer planned by a Supreme 
" Reason, but planned on supreme reason. We 
" must, indeed, in this view also, put into the 



THE PERMANENT IN RELIGION, ETC. 97 

" cause what lies in the effect; what comes out 
*' of it, must have been iu it. But this is noth- 
"ing more than the limitation of oar human 
" mode of conception ; the universe is, iu fact, 
" at one and the same time cause and effect, ex- 

" ternal and internal It is consequently 

"that sometliing on which we feel ourselves 
" absolutely dependent. It is in no wise or man- 
" ner a coarse domineering power, before which 
"we bow in dumb resignation, but is at once 
" order and law, reason and goodness, to which 
" we commit ourselves in loving trust. And yet 
" more, as we perceive in ourselves that draw- 
" ing to the rational and good, which we believe 
" we perceive in the world, as we find that we 
"are the beings by whom it is felt and recog- 
"nized, in whom it is to become personal, we 
" feel ourselves, in our inmost soul, in affinity 
" with that on which we find ourselves depend- 
" ent — in our very dependence we find ourselves 
"free; in our feeling for the universe pride is 
"mingled with humility, joy with resignation.''* 

^ P. 136 seq. Sechst. Aufl. 142 seq. 



98 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

X. 

THE NEW FAITH. 

This " feeling for the universe" is Strauss's 
religion, the " new faith," which is to set aside 
the old faith. 

Strauss himself expresses a doubt whether 
"persons" will allow this feeling to pass for 
religion. And beyond doubt "persons," that is, 
the great majority of those who associate a dis- 
tinct notion w^ith the word " religion," will 
decline to bestow it on this new faith. But 
Strauss cares little for names, and hence to the 
question, Whether "we" have religion still? 
his reply is, "Yes or no, just as persons are 
inclined to take it." 

To us also the name is a matter of little mo- 
ment, but the more do we attach importance to the 
true notion and the grounds on which it is estab- 
lished. We do not deny that Strauss possesses 
the feeling for the universe to which he laj^s 
claim, nor that he believes in the correctness of 
the conceptions out of which that feeling springs 
up in his breast. But we do maintain that these 
conceptions and assumptions are not only ex- 
tremely vague and superficial, but that they 
contradict each other in manifold respects, as 



THE NEW FAITH. 99 

they also contradict the assertions involving his 
whole principle, which he makes in various 
other places. It is one marked feature that 
what is inexorably demanded by logic, he treats 
as "the limitation of our human mode of con- 
ception." He acknowledges that " we must put 
into the cause also, what lies in the effect," and 
consequently that if the world be " the working- 
place of the rational and good," we are com- 
pelled to suppose that for the rational and good 
which is effected there must also be a cause; and 
that we cannot avoid conceiving of the cause as 
different from the effect, the external as different 
from the internal. But inasmuch as this pitiful 
logical necessity is nothing more than a limita- 
tion of our human mode of conception, the uni- 
verse is, " at one and the same time^ cause and 
effect, external and internal." We are " com- 
pelled^^^ indeed, to distinguish the two, and 
consequently are unable to think one and the 
same thing, as at one and the same time, cause 
and effect; but as this is merely the result of the 
limitation just spoken of, we totally disregard 
it, and proclaim the truth, which we have no 
power of thinking, proclaim it in words, desti- 
tute of all meaning, but none the less sonorous I 
Strauss does not consider that we may with 
equal propriety, speak of the truth of wooden 



100 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

iron, or of a four-cornered triangle, and, to come 
more closelj^home to him still, that the doctrine 
of the Trinity, which he so decidedly contests, 
on the ground that three cannot be one, can 
make a direct appeal to him, and can, with equal 
propriety, assert that this logical distinction of 
one and three is nothing more than a limitation 
of our human mode of thinking. 

XI. 

THE DISCOYERY. 

The "discovery" that in the world there is 
not only order and law, but also that there is a 
''development of the higher from the lower, of 
''the delicate from the coarse, of the mild from 
"the harsh/' and that this higher something, 
this delicacy, mildness or tenderness, when we 
find it in the circle of human life, is the "ra- 
tional and good," this discovery is the basis of 
Strauss's new religion. The "we," in whose 
name he speaks, will no doubt rest with entire 
satisfaction in this discovery. But the scientific 
investigator, and especially the philosophical 
thinker, have the preposterous whim of declin- 
ing to be put off with mere words; they will in- 
sist on asking after their meaning and force. 
And we ask, accordingly, what is that "higher 



THE DISCOVERY. - 101 

something, that delicacy and mildness," of 
which Strauss is speaking? In what way is it 
to be distinguished from the low, the coarse, 
the harsh? As Strauss leaves us without a 
reply, we should be compelled, on this ground, 
were there no other, to deny that the at- 
tempt at establishing the new religion has any 
scientific value whatever. Higher and lower, 
coarse and delicate, harsh and mild, are desig- 
nations whose tenor is so indefinite, so relative 
and slight, that unless they be accurately de- 
fined they amount to nothing. And why is it 
that the delicate, mild little squirrel is more 
rational, and is better than the coarse, rough 
swine? Why is the humming-bird better than 
the owl? Why is the butterfly better than the 
cockchafer? Why is the rose better than the 
thistle? The professed materialist, to whom 
everything is blind necessity and conformity to 
law, has no right to make distinctions either 
between higher and lower, between coarse and 
delicate, or between the rational and irrational, 
the good and the bad. What is the product of 
blind necessity is equally high and low, equally 
rational and irrational, equally good and bad, 
because it is neither the one nor the other. 
The fact that materialism does not see the con- 
tradiction in which it involves itself, in impos- 

4 



102 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

ing on a blind, unconscious, unthinking neces- 
sity, the adjustment of a development of a 
higher something out of a lower, the control- 
ling with reason and goodness, this fact allows 
of but one solution. The solution is found in 
the superficiality and lack of thought which 
seem to cleave inevitably to that system. For 
such a control as this view concedes, presupposes 
of necessity a distinction between the higher and 
the lower, the good and the bad. The lower 
must from the beginning have been so designed 
that the higher could shape itself out of it; it 
must consequently have been originally placed 
in relation to the higher something, and must 
have been determined in conformity with it. 
But how does it come to avoid the irrational, or 
to carry on a training which results in the 
rational, inasmuch as there is no distinction 
w^hatever between the two? The rational and 
irrational are not things which the hand can 
grasp; there is no such thing as rational or 
irrational matter. The rational and irrational 
is nothing at all material, nothing phenomenal, 
nothing addressing our sense perceptions. It 
is a something which is to be inferred from cer- 
tain given conceptions. The rational is there- 
fore itself conception, it is nothing but conception, 
which we shape to ourselves mainly from our 



THE DISCOVERY. 103 

own attitude, our willing and thinking over our 
conduct in its ethical relations. The power of 
deriving this conception from the facts of con- 
sciousness, and of thinking, willing and acting 
in conformity with it, we call reason. Where 
there is no thinking, willing and acting, in an 
ethical respect, there is consequently no rea- 
son ; the use of the term is an abuse. Of the 
reason of nature and the rationality of nature 
we know nothing at all originally. We trans- 
fer them to nature, because we believe we rec- 
ognize in it a similar bearing of things and 
events to each other, a similar order and har- 
mony, an activity involving plan and aim, pro- 
ceeding from similar motives, directed to the 
preservation of the whole, and to the promo- 
tion of the interests of the individual parts. 
But in this very process we impute to nature 
the conception of the rational, and of a think- 
ing, w^illing and acting derived from that 
conception^ and we can talk no longer of blind 
necessity. The consistent materialist who 
knows what he is talking of, is necessarily 
a casualist in the strict sense, that is, he holds 
that the seeming conformity to law, the order, 
the rationalitj^, whether in nature or in human 
life, are either mere seeming and illusion, or 
the fortuitous result of fortuitous combinations 



104 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

of fortuitously existing matter, out of fortuit- 
ously occurring operations, which just as fortu- 
itously may at any moment, separate, fall to 
pieces, or enter into new combinations. If in 
spite of all this he is determined to have religion 
still, he has nothing left to worship but insen- 
sate Chance. 

XII. 

THE GOOD AKD THE BAD. 

And what right furthermore has Strauss to 
draw a distinction between good and bad? We 
can only speak of good in the ethical sense on 
the assumption of the freedom of the will. And 
a being in absolute dependence on nature, and 
its laws, cannot even in the most contracted 
sense be called free. It is certainly beyond all 
comprehension how such a being can ever go 
so far as to "react'' against his ''absolute de- 
pendence,'' and strive after freedom. Certainly 
this striving is a gross error, a treacherous illu- 
sion, and that reaction can be nothing more 
than a purely impotent outrage. The good in 
Strauss's new religion can therefore be nothing 
more than the feeling of pleasure, the agreeable, 
the useful. With it coincides then, as a matter 
of course, the rational, for these two notions 
Strauss identifies. His only reason, therefore. 



THE GOOD AND THE BAD. 105 

for regarding the delicate, mild and tender as 
good, is that he supposes that these are more 
agreeable, delightful and beneficial than their 
opposites. The great majority of men, however, 
find themselves much more comfortable in what 
is gross and coarse, than in what is fine and 
tender; they regard a coarse license as far more 
agreeable than subjection to law, and the bad, 
as in many cases, more useful than the good. 
With w^hat right then does Strauss maintain 
that the opposite is good? When the sensuous 
material man of Strauss's description finds him- 
self pained by the law, order and reason, which 
sway in the universe, why should he persist in 
calling them good? In fact we have once more 
a gross contradiction of Strauss's own premises 
when he pronounces the "coarse domineering 
power," the coarse dissoluteness, to be evil, 
while on the other hand, the "resignation^' to 
the order and reason which sway in the universe 
is good. He even goes beyond this and de- 
fines man as the being in whom the rational 
and good "is to become personal." Yet, after 
all this, he gainsays the claim of this very be- 
ing, man, to soul, freedom, morality. A be- 
ing "absolutely dependent" on nature and its 
laws, cannot feel that nature's power is "a coarse 
domineering," cannot subject himself to it, either 



106 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

in "dumb resignation/' or "with loving trust." 
For if no real possibility of transgressing the 
law, coexist with the law% subjection under law 
is no 5^//-subjection, no ^^//'-surrender, but is 
simply an unconditioned state of subjection. 



XIII. 

STRAUSS IN CONFLICT WITH CONSISTENT MATERIAL- 
ISM ; pessimism; Schopenhauer, yon hartmann. 

The consistent materialists, therefore, who do 
not find in the world embodied reason and good- 
ness, are regarded by Strauss as his opponents, 
though in other respects they are in complete 
harmony with his principles. He therefore re- 
sorts to sharp w^eapons in his battle with the 
Pessimism of Schopenhauer and Von Hart- 
mann. He finds in them, as he does in every 
pessimistic view of the w^orld, '' the grossest 
contradiction." For " if this world is a thing 
'' which had better not be, then, forsooth, the 
'' thinking of philosophers, which forms a part 
"of this world, is a thinking which had better 
"not be thought. The pessimist philosopher 
" does not notice how, more than all, he declares 
" as bad his own thinking, which declares the 
'' world to bo bad; but if a thinking? which de- 



PESSIMISM. 107 

" clares the world to be bad is bad thiiikiug, 
" then it follows, on the contrary, that the world 
" is good. Optimism may, as a rule, make its 
" own task a little too easy; and in this aspect 
" Schopenhauer's proof of the tremendous part 
"played by pain and evil in the world are en- 
'^ tirely in place; but every true philosophy is 
" necessarily optimistic, as in any other theory 
" it denies its own right to existence (it saws off 
'' the branch on which it is sitting).''"^ This 
criticism is entirely convincing. But does it 
not involve Strauss's own philosophy and the 
new religion he has built on it ? If nothing but 
the delicate, the mild, the tender is good, is 
there not at least as much of the gross, the 
coarse, the harsh in the world? And if good 
be no more than the secular well-being of man, 
who is thoroughly earthy and material, is not 
every one with whom, in his own estimation, 
things have gone badly on the whole, or at least 
not as well as they ought to have gone, entirely 
justified in maintaining that the subsisting regu- 
lation of the world is bad ? Is he not at least 
on as defensible ground as that taken by the 
optimist with the opposite view ? To say noth- 
ing, then, of the internal contradictions of 

* P. 142, Sechst. Aufl. 147. 



108 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

Strauss's view, does he not make his own task 
a little " too easy" when he grounds his optim- 
ism on the "discoveries*^ which have been 
stated ? 

XIV. 

"what is our apprehension of the universe?" 

After Strauss has laid the basis of religion 
in general, only on our knowledge of the world, 
and the feeling which springs from it, he at- 
tempts in the third division an answer to the 
question, " What is our apprehension of the 
universe?'^ He applies himself forthwith to 
the knotty, much-mooted problem, whether the 
universe is to be conceived of as infinite or 
finite. He decides that it is infinite, but again 
without telling us what he means by infinity. 
And yet the old controversy was caused by a 
failure on the part of the combatants to attempt 
to come to an understanding in advance in ref- 
erence to the notion of the infinite. If we take 
the word in a purely negative sense, and such 
a sense the word itself involves, it is evident 
that the infinite, as the negation of the finite, 
or limited, not only presupposes the finite of 
which it is the negation, but is in itself nothing 
but negation, and is, consequently, yiothing. To 
speak of a primordial something, infinite in itself 



OUR APPEEHENSION OF THE UNIVERSE. 109 

in this sense, whether we suppose it to be the 
Deity or the universe, is consequently a contra- 
diction in the adjective. The finite, it is true, 
involves also a negation ; it is, ihdeed, a posi- 
tive, an existent by another existent, but with a 
negation, a bound or limitation, attached to it, 
and is, consequently, a being which in itself in- 
volves a non-being. The first problem, conse- 
quently, is to define, to determine the notion of 
the finite. This involves the solution of the old 
Eleatic question, How can being coexist with 
non-being? Had Strauss thoroughly reflected 
on this question, he would have discovered that 
no answer to it is possible, except by the notion 
of distinction and of distinguishing activity as 
the fundamental and primal activitj'^ of all think- 
ing, or consciousness, and as the determining 
primal force of all that is in being. Instead of 
this, without anything further, he proclaims the 
infiniteness of the world, and imagines that he 
has solved the problem by making a distinction 
between " world in the absolute sense, that is, 
" the universe, and world in the relative sense 
''in which it has a plural." Thereupon he 
maintains that " though it is true that every 
"world in the latter sense, through parts of the 
" totality in its widest compass, has its limita- 
''tion in space as it has its beginning and end 



110 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

' in time, yet the universe spreads itself forth 
'and maintains its continnitj^ inimitably, alike 
' through all space and all time."* " Conse- 
' quentlj' not 6nly our earth, but our solar system 
' also, and every other part of the totality of the 
' universe, has at one period been what it no 
' longer is [in this sort did not exist at all], and 
'will one day cease to be as it is now," but as 
to the universe " there never was a time when 
' it was not, a time when there was in it no 
' distinction of celestial bodies, no life, no rea- 
' son. All this, if it was not in one part of the 
' totality, was in another part, and had ceased 
' to be in a third part ; here it was coming into 
' being, there it was in full subsistence, in a 
' third place it was passing away; the universe 
' is an infinite complex of worlds in all the 
'stadia of origin and transition, and because of 
' this eternal revolution and alternation pre- 
' serves itself in eternal absolute fulness of 
' life."f This train of thought is essentially that 
of Kant. Strauss has, in his own opinion, im- 
proved upon it, but in reality has made it worse 
in the mending, by throwing out the notion of 
creation and of God, and With this he imagines 

^ Sechst. Aufl. 152. 

t P. 148 seq. Sechst. Aufl. 153. 



OUR APPREHENSION OF THE UNIVERSE. Ill 

be has disposed of the whole matter. But is not 
an "z^yHimited" whole, made up of nothing but 
limiled parts, be they celestial bodies or atoms, 
a glaring contradiction in the adjective? Is 
there not a palpable contradiction in this de- 
scription of a totalit}^ in which at every time, 
and consequently at 07ie and the same time, a part 
coming into being, subsists and has subsisted 
by the side of one which has already come into 
being? The part which has come into being 
must, nevertheless, also at one time have been 
in the course of coming into being, must conse- 
quently have been in being before the part which 
is just coming into being, and consequently as 
something in actual being cannot be associated 
as simultaneous \\\\\\ what is just coming into 
being. In other words, just as little as we are 
in a condition to think of an infinite whole with 
nothing but finite parts, that is, a finite infinite- 
ness or an infinite finiteness, just as little can 
we think of an activity which is in a purely nega- 
tive sense eternal, that is, absolutely without be- 
ginning. For the act proceeding from such an 
activity must likewise be simply without begin- 
ning, as an activity without something to do is 
no activity. But we can only think of the act 
as the result of the activity, the activity only as 
prior to the act. The act begins consequently of 



112 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

necessity by and with the activity; an act with- 
out beginning is a contradiction in the adjective, 
as that would mean an act without activity, an 
effect w^ithout a cause. It follows also that an ac- 
tivity without beginning is a contradiction in the 
adjective, for that, as an act without beginning, 
is impossible, and would be an activity without 
an act, a cause without an effect. For this very 
reason then we can conceive a beginning which 
is positive, the absolute antecedent of all origin 
and of all that is originated, of all doing and 
of all that comes to pass, and which on this very 
account has no beginning in another. In fact 
we are compelled to accept such an absolute an- 
tecedent, inasmuch as the unbesrinnine:, the 
simple negation of beginning, involves as its 
own presupposition the very thing it denies, and 
consequently involves the thought of absolute 
beginning. If Strauss, then, does not mean to 
insist that a finiteness without end, an act with- 
out activity, is conceivable, he will have to 
abandon the infiniteness and eternity of his 
universe, and will have to concede the positively 
infinite, as that which sets all limitation and 
bounds, all greatness, and all measure (by dis- 
tinction), and the positively eternal as the abso- 
lute antecedent of all origin and of all that is 
originated, of all doing and of all that comes to 
pass, and hence of the world itself. 



THE COSMOGONY OF KANT AND LA PLACE. 113 

XY. 

THE COSMOGONY OF KANT AND LA PLACE. 

In order to show how we may apprehend the 
origination of a world, in the '^ relative " sense 
of the word, without the interference of a 
higher and divine power, Strauss goes on to 
develop in his own fashion the familiar hypothe- 
sis by which Kant and La Place explained the 
rise and development of our solar system. [The 
proof I have presented that this self-origination 
and self-development without a prirniim movens 
et deierminans — a primary mover and determi- 
ner — is inconceivable,* Strauss, as a matter of 
course, again fails to notice. He notices, never- 
theless, some of the facts which are in decided 
conflict with the hypothesis, but he puts them 
all aside with the wei^-htv remark : '' This be- 
longs to those inexactnesses in the results of 
nature of which Kant speaks !"t] It would 
far transcend the proper limits of an article in 
a Review to follow with our criticism each step 
of Strauss's exposition. We shall confine our 
notices therefore to a few untenable positions 
taken by him in the sphere of the natural sci- 

* Ulrici : Gott u. die Natur, Zweit. Aufl. 337-353. 
t Alt. u. Neu. Glaub. 158. 



114 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

ences. It is inadmissible to argue from tlie 
shortening of the track of a comet (Enke's) to 
the orbit of the planets, the shortening of which 
has not to this hour been established by any 
reliable observation. For out of the demon- 
strated fact of the division of Biela's comet, in 
1845j it is evident that under some circum- 
stances the comets may be diminished in bulk. 
The comet thus divided did not reappear in 
1866, nor in 1872, when it could not have failed 
to be observed. Instead of that, in November, 
1872, there was observed a fall of a great num- 
ber of shooting stars, which previously had 
moved in the track about the sun in which 
Biela's comet had kept, rendering it highly 
probable that the comet had gone to fragments, 
and that under certain conditions of the masses 
of matter of which comets are composed, they 
may be completely sundered so as to go to pieces. 
With the diminution of the mass the track is 
necessarily shortened. Strauss is mistaken 
when he goes on to assert: "Assuming, with 
*'Kant and La Place, the mass of nebular ex- 
" tended matter as the relative primal matter of 
" our planetary system, we conceive, even if we 
" suppose it to be derived from a previous pro- 
" cess of combustion, that it was completely 
"cooled because of its extreme disgregation.'^ 



ORIGIN OF LIFE UPON EARTH. 115 

Conformably with this we have to assume that 
the scattered atoms " did not attain heat and 
"luminositj^ until they approximated under the 
"law of gravitation." For it is established by 
natural science, that the ponderable forms of 
matter — apart from the few permanent gases — 
are resolved into masses of vapor, or pass into 
" disgregation " only in consequence of increas- 
ing heat, and require sustained heat to be kept 
in that condition. With the beo-innins; of the 
cooling, gravitation and chemical attraction 
come into corresponding activity. That the 
primary matter should be " completely cooled 
oflV and should yet be a nebulous mass, is a 
thing which natural science shows to be impos- 
sible. It is equally false that "the revolving 
"motion is natural to a spherical mass consist- 
" ing of matter in the form of vapor or of fluid." 
On the contrary, it is a universally acknowledged 
theorem that no ponderable mass simply of itself^ 
without a force moving it, sets itself in motion, 
either of a rotary character or of any other. 

XVI. 

ORIGIN OF LIFE UPON EARTH— GENERATIO ^QUI- 
YOCA. ORGANIC AND INORGANIC. 

With a quick turn Strauss finishes up the 
development of our terrestrial globe, and goes 



116 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

on to the question in regard to the origination of 
organisms or "living substances.''* Though he 
admits that "in consequence of the difficulty of 
" making conclusive experiments, a general deci- 
"sion has not yet been reached/' he yet decides 
without hesitation for the generatio oequivoca or 
spontanea. He reduces the question to this 
shape: "Whether it is possible that an indi- 
"vidual organism, even of the least perfect sort, 
" can arise in any other way than through its 
"own like? can arise, to wit, by chemical or 
" morphologic processes, which take place not 
" in the egg^ or in the womb, but in other forms 
" of matter, in organic or inorganic fluids."t 

ViRCHOW says that all known facts give their 
testimony against spontaneous generation in our 
day. To meet this Strauss resorts to "entirely 
" extraordinary conditions, in the era of the 
"greater revolutions of the earth," that out of 
them life may come forth, ''of course, in its yet 
incompletest form,'^ of which the Bathybius and 
Moneres are examples. This coming forth con- 
sists in the " special movement of the matter, 
" through which, from time to time, a part of 
" collective matter withdraws, from the ordinary 
" course of its movements, into special organico- 

^ P. 167, Sechst. Aufl. 171. 
t P. 169, Sechst. Aufl. 173. 



OEIGIN OF LIFE UPON EARTH. 117 

" chemical combinations. In this state it remains 
" for a time, and then reverts to the general re- 
"lations of movement."* ''If the question be 
"properly regarded/^ continues Strauss, "it 
" does not involve the creation of something new, 
but only the bringing of existent forms of mat- 
ter and forces into another species of combina- 
tion and movement, and for this a sufficient 
occasion may be found, in the conditions of 
" primeval time, so totally diverse from those of 
" the present, the wholly different temperature, 
" and of atmospheric composition, and similar 
*'causes.'^t 

Strauss forgets that but a few pages before he 
has observed : " The geology of our day is in- 
" clined to construe the details of the formation 
" of our earth far more in accordance with ordi- 
" nary method, far more in accordance with what 
"we see at present in the course of nature. "J 
And, in fact, the geology of our day, subsequent 
to Lyell, is not only "inclined'^ thus "to con- 
strue" the details, but has pretty clearly demon- 
strated that it is precisely in this way things 
actually came to pass. The appeal to " the con- 
ditions of primeval time," so totally diverse from 

■^ Yircbow. 

t Sechst. Aufl. 175. 

X Sechst. Aufl. 171. 



118 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

those of the present, is an evasion which is no 
longer allowable, especially as it is an estab- 
lished fact, that a "wholly different tempera- 
ture," that is, one higher than the tropical, the 
highest degree now known, as well as a "differ- 
ent atmospheric composition," does not farther 
organic life, but, on the contrarj^, destroys it. 
But were we to grant that life consists only in 
that special movement of a part of " collective 
matter," and that the conditions of primeval 
time furnish a sufficient occasion for the origi- 
nation of that movement, the question still re- 
mains to be answered, Y/hy is it but " a part?" 
Why does not the entire collective matter, at 
disposal, and fitted for this special movement, 
enter on it? Another question forces itself on 
us. Why does this part remain only "for a 
time" in these special organico-chemical com- 
binations, and then revert to the general rela- 
tions of movement? Besides, it is false that 
the "living substance" consists merely in a spe- 
cial organico-chemical combination of matter. 
On the contrary, the question is urgent. How 
can an or2:anico-chemical combination of diverse 
atoms, oxj^gen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and 
others, come to live ? To reach this involves 
more than the entrance of this or that set of 
atoms into an organico-chemical combination by 



ORIGIN OF LIFE UPON EARTH. 119 

means of special movement, and then remaining 
for a time in the combination. Sugar, urine, cy- 
anogen, ethal, and other substances, are organico- 
chemical combinations, but they are not organ- 
isms, they are not '' living substances." Every 
organism, even of the very lowest grade, even the 
Bathybius and the Moneres, exercises distinct 
functions. It is compelled to preserve itself, to 
nourish itself, to keep off certain matter from 
itself, to draw other matter to it, to take it into 
itself, to propagate itself. Without this it would 
not subsist for a moment. With the cessation 
of this spontaneity, itself and its kind would 
cease to exist. These functions, these " spe- 
cial" movements are found in organized matter 
only, never in unorganized. It is these, not what 
are called the organico-chemical combinations of 
certain forms of matter which constitute the most 
general and essential marks of every ''living sub- 
stance," and of the living substance only. They 
too, then, must have a cause. And as they are 
'' special" processes, deviating from the general 
conditions of movement, as it is an established 
fact that the chemical substances within the or- 
ganic combinations exhibit different activities 
from those they possess outside of them, we are 
compelled to suppose a "special" cause for these 
special processes. Whether we call this cause 



120 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

vital force, or give it whatever name we please, 
so long as the chemist fails in generating in his 
laboratory, from purely inorganic substances, a 
" living substance," a solitary organism, even of 
the very lowest order, so long will he fail to re- 
move either the distinction between an organ- 
ism and a mere chemical combination of matter, 
whether of an organic or inorganic nature, or 
the distinction between a living being and a 
complicated machine. So long, at least, will 
every man cling to that distinction, who does 
not one day acknowledge and the next day 
deny the law of causality, as a legitimate law of 
thought. 

XVII. 

ORIGIK OF SPECIES. THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 

In the much-mooted question of the origin of 
species, Strauss, as has already been intimated, 
is an enthusiastic adherent of Darwin. He ac- 
knowledges, indeed, that the Darwinian theory 
is "still extremely imperfect;" "it leaves infi- 
"nitely much unexplained, and in the unex- 
" plained are not merely subordinate matters, 
"but what are reallj^ chief and cardinal points; 
"he rather hints at solutions which may be pos- 
"sible in the future, than gives them himself." 
Still Strauss claims that the theory is a grand 



ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 121 

advance, full of significance. For Darwin "has 
"opened the door through which the happier 
"world that is to follow us will throw out all 
"nriiracle never to return. Whoever is aware 
"how much hangs on the idea of miracle, will 
" thank him for this as one of the greatest bene- 
" factors of our race.""^ 

It is an extraordinary thing that the great 
critic never turns the edge of his criticism 
against himself, his own opinions and preju- 
dices, his own sympathies and antipathies ! It 
is not diflicult to comprehend that the author of 
"The Life of Jesus'^ has no affection for theo- 
logical miracles. But is it allowable, for the 
gratification of this antipathy, to laud as the 
greatest and most beneficent of discoveries, a 
theory which leaves unexplained "what are 
really chief and cardinal points," and which 
consequently is, in fact, no theory at all, only 
because in Strauss^s judgment it does away 
with the idea of miracle? Is it admissible, in 
favor of such a theory, to confound notions 
which are widely different? Yet this is the 
very thing which Strauss does. Led by this 
antipathy he confounds the theological miracles, 
such for example as that of the wedding-feast 

* P. 177,Seclist. Aufl. 181. 



122 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

at Ciina, and others of its class, with the mira- 
cles of natural science; that is, with the incom- 
prehensible fact which natural science is inca- 
pable of explaining. 

The older theory assumed that the lowest 
genera and species of organic being arose from 
a force not assignable to nature, consequently^ 
a supernatural cause, a metaphysical force. 
Darwin maintains that organic being involves 
separate evolutions, and that the higher have 
arisen from the lower by gradual transforma- 
tion. The old view certainly was not able to 
explain the precedency in question; it was not 
in a condition to demonstrate the activity and 
the mode of operation of that metaphysical 
potency. But Darwin's theory also leaves un- 
explained "what are really chief and cardinal 
points," and must in addition leave uncompre- 
hended that "special" movement as the first 
cause of the chemical organic combinations. 

To this theory there clings quite enough be- 
yond comprehension and beyond explication. 
If each and every thing which we can neither 
comprehend nor explain be a miracle, then are 
we, in spite of all that has been attained by the 
investigation of nature, still compassed by down- 
right miracles. Or is Strauss, perhaps, able to 
tell us how the force of gravitation can put 



ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 123 

bodies into motion at a distance of thousands 
and thousands of miles? — a fact, which as is 
well known, the illustrious Newton pronounced 
as beyond the power of imagination. Or does 
Strauss, perchance, know" how to give us a 
statement "as to the cause of the diversity of 
"the chemical elements, the nature of the force 
"w^hich occasions the chemical combinations, 
"the law^s which control the chemical metamor- 
"phoses," things of which Kekule* says, "our 
"chemistry possesses no sort of exact knowl- 
"edge.^' Can he bring within our grasp the 
mode in which light (the luminiferous force) 
sets the ethereal atoms into transversal undula- 
tions, and how this movement transmits itself 
in exactly the opposite direction in longitudinal 
undulation, albeit physics, as Eisenlohr con- 
fesses, "can furnish nothing certain in regard 
"to the causes of the wave-movement of the 
"ether effected by the surface of the sun and of 
"the fixed stars." Or is he, perchance, able to 
explain the extremely diverse operations of elec- 
tricity, which Eisenlohr styles, "the unknown 
"cause of a vast multitude of phenomena.'^ 
Especially is Strauss at all prepared to explain 
the law of inductive electricity; to wit, "that 

^ Lehrbuch der Organischen Chemie, p. 95. 



124 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

" the induced stream, on approximation to the 
"primary stream, shows a tendency opposite 
"to it, but on being removed from the pri- 
"mary stream assumes the same direction with 
"it?" These are but a few of the unanswered 
questions, of the unexplained and uncompre- 
hended facts in the sphere of the natural sci- 
ences. If Strauss be not able to solve them, 
he is bound to confess that on the first point, 
even that "happier aftertime'^ has exceedingly 
little prospect of "getting rid of" miracle, as 
he uses the word. 

After this allusion, in passing, to the su- 
premest benefactor of humanity, Strauss pre- 
sents us wnth a very popular, excessively super- 
ficial delineation or description of the Darwinian 
theory, without ever mentioning, to say nothing 
of attempting to answer, the many and w^eighty 
objections w^hich have been raised against it, 
even by w^riters of high authority in the natu- 
ral sciences. He might have found these in 
Huber's work.* This is not the place to esti- 
mate the weight of these objections. We pro- 
pose no more than to point out the utterly un- 
critical course pursued by the renowned critic. 



J. Huber: Die Lehre Darwin's &c. MUnchen, 1873. 



MAN AND THE ANIMALS. 125 

He accepts the Darwinian doctrine with childlike 
trust. He believes in it in spite of the con- 
siderations of various kinds, the grounds of 
doubt, the confutations which rise against it. 
He does the very thing which he charges on the 
"devout believers,'^ whom he so despises and 
assails. This is the way they treat his critical 
objections and assaults. He believes in Dar- 
win's doctrine partly on authority, partly be- 
cause it suits his personal opinions and views! 



xvni. 

THE APE AND MAN. MAN AND THE ANIMALS, THEIR 
AFFINITIES AND DISTINCTIONS. 

From the theory of descendence it inevitably 
results, according to Strauss, that man is de- 
rived from the ape, if not from a species now 
existing, yet from a pretended species which 
has become extinct. In a popular treatment of 
the subject he presents the grounds for this in- 
disputably logical inference from the theory. 
He launches out into testimonies for the great 
intellectual endowments of the animals, or at 
least of particular kinds of animals. He con- 
curs also with Darwin in the opinion that in 
the higher animals "the beginnings of moral 



126 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKEK. 

feeling""^ reveal themselves. ITot only are the 
instincts of animals which direct themselves 
"to the care of their young, the anxiety, toil 
" and sacrifice through which they pass for their 
"young,'' to be looked upon as "revealing a 
tendency to the higher moral faculties/' but "a 
"sort of feeling of honor and of conscience, is 
"scarcely to be mistaken in the nobler horses 
" and dogs which have been well cared for." He 
adds, indeed, that the conscience of a dog "is 
"not entirely without justice referred to the 
"rod," but, he asks, " whether the case is very 
"different with the rougher class of men?" 
That means that the human conscience, and 
consequently human morality, is to be referred 
to the rod. For that the earliest men, as they 
descend from the race of apes, must have been 
not merely "rough," but excessively rough, is 
indubitably certain, inasmuch as it is an indu- 
bitable consequence of the theory of descen- 
dence. But apart from the fact that this pre- 
tended conscience of the horse and dog is to be 
referred to the rod and whip only^ Strauss 
overlooks the fiict, that the whip must be at 
hand, and that there must be somebody to ap- 
ply it, if the conscience is to be brought into 

* Sechst. Aufl. 208. 



MAN AND THE ANIMALS. 127 

being or aroused. Man uses the rod on the dog. 
Who is there to use it on man? Another man, 
of course. The first man then who employed 
the rod to arouse a conscience in another must 
of necessity have possessed conscience and 
moral feeling, in and of himself, without the 
aid of the rod. The question inevitably arises, 
why does one dog never use the conscience- 
making rod on another dog? Is it perhaps 
because dogs possess only ''a sort" of con- 
science? But apart from the fact that Strauss 
does not devote a word of explanation as to 
what this "sort,'' be it species or be it variety, 
may be, he must in any case acknowledge that 
the conscience of a dog or the conscience of a 
man, which is aroused and controlled by the 
rod, is very different not only "in quantity,'^ 
but in quality too, from the conscience which is 
self-awakened and self-evolved. His first duty 
then is to show that the two are nevertheless 
identical in principle and character. To do 
this he must show that the nursing and feeding 
of their young by the higher orders of animals, 
are to be regarded as a token of moral feeling, 
or of the higher moral faculties. This is the 
more imperative, as it is well known that as 
soon as their young are grown, as soon as, in 
the case of birds, the brood is fledged, not 



128 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

only does the care cease at once, but there is a 
change to the very reverse. They drive away 
their young, they enter into the same combat 
and struggles with them as with others for 
food, all of which furnishes evidence of the 
purely instinctive character of the whole. Until 
Strauss succeeds in doing this, we shall feel 
justified in finding the solution of his assertions 
in that mingling and confounding of notions, 
which clings to materialism like an endemic 
sickness, which seems to attack every one who 
gives himself up to that system. 

XIX. 

THE SOUL. 

The " incarnation " of the ape leads the de- 
fender of that view by a very natural transition 
to the contested question concerning the soul. 
Strauss stands fast by the colors of the new 
faith. He denies without qualification any sort 
of specific diflference between body and soul. 
He claims, if not to have settled the question, 
yet at least to have broken the pathway to a 
solution of it, by proclaiming the doctrine of 
sensualism, and referring all thinking to sensa- 
tion, and starts the question : ''If under certain 
'' conditions movement is transmuted into 



THE SOUL. 129 

' warmth, why may there not be conditions 
' under which it is transmuted into sensation ? 
' We have the necessary conditions, the appa- 
' ratus for this in the brain and nervous system 
'of the higher animals, and in those organs, 
' which in the lower orders of animals supply 
'their place. On the one side the nerve is 
' touched and put into motion, on the other 
' there is a respondent sensation, a perception ; 
'a process of thinking springs up. And con- 
' versely on the way outward the sensation and 
' the thought set the members of the body in 
' motion. Helmholtz says : * In the generation 
' ' of warmth by friction and concussion the 
' ' motion of the entire mass passes over into a 
' ' motion of its minutest particles, and con- 
' ' versely, by the generation of mechanical 
' ' power by warmth the motion of the minutest 
"particles passes over into a motion of the 
'' whole mass. ^ I ask then, is this essentially 
' different from the view I am urging ? Is not 
' what I have asserted but the sequel to the 
' statement of Helmholtz ?"* Helmholtz 
himself would certainly answer this question 
with a decided No. Strauss forgets that what 
we call warmth does not exist, physically, in in- 

^ P. 206 seq. Sechst. Aufl. 211, 212. 



130 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

organic nature at all. The word designates a 
distinct sensation, which under certain circum- 
stances is present and comes to our conscious- 
ness. Physics has demonstrated that the rise 
of it is conditioned by distinct movements of 
the ethereal atoms, and in a certain respect of 
the ponderable atoms, the "minutest portions'' 
of a mass, that is, it arises when these move- 
ments meet nerves sensible to them, capable of 
excitation by them. Warmth, therefore, pre- 
supposes a being capable of sensation, endowed 
with sensibility. There exists consequently not 
the slightest analogy between the origination of 
sensation and those phj'sical movements which 
pass from the masses to their minutest parts, 
and again from the parts to the mass. The mi- 
nutest particles of air, when by compression or 
by the rays of the sun they are set into those 
motions, have sensation of warmth just as little 
as the particles of iron or silver in a state of 
fusion have it. For as the illustrious physiolo- 
gist DoNDERS observes, " The essential charac- 
•' ter of all forms of operation, and of the faculty 
" of operation with which we are acquainted, is 
" motion and condition of motion, and no man 
"can shape to liimself a conception, how out of 
" motions, be they combined in any manner 
" they may, consciousness or 2i\\y psj'chical ac- 



THE SOUL. 131 

" tivity whatever can arise." Were it granted 
also that the nerves, if they are affected by those 
movements, went into a similar movement of 
their minutest particles — a theory which is far 
from having been proven — that does not involve 
any sensation of warmth. Du Bois-Reymond 
— an authority in natural science to whom 
Strauss now and then appeals — puts the point 
in question in these words: "What imaginable 
" connection is there, on the one side, between 
" distinct movements of distinct atoms in my 
"brain, and on the other, of facts primitive for 
" me, incapable of further definition, beyond all 
" possibility of denial, facts like these : I feel 
" pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, 
"I smell the aroma of a rose, I hear the tones 
" of the organ, I see something red — and the 
"assurance just as directly flowing from these 
" facts : Therefore I am ?" Du Bois-Reymond 
regards the question also as unanswerable, and 
hence states the case more amply: "It is just 
" as incomprehensible throughout and forever, 
" that it should not be a matter of indifference 
" to a quantity of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, 
" nitrogen, oxygen and others, how they lie and 
" move, how thej^ once lay and moved, and how 
" they are about to lie and move." It is not 
then at consciousness, not at free will we first 



132 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

reach " the limits of our knowledge of nature." 
Those insurmountable limits are ah-eady reached 
in " the problem of sense-perception."'^ Unless 
Strauss be prepared to perform what Du Bois- 
E-EYMOND, in the name of natural science, pro- 
nounces impossible, unless he be prepared to an- 
swer this question, unless he can make it intel- 
ligible why, to a number of atoms of carbon, 
hydrogen and other substances, out of which 
the nerves in common with all the bodily organs 
consist, it should not be indifferent whether they 
were arranged in this or that combination — un- 
less Strauss is prepared to do all this, the one- 
sided materialism to which he gives his adhesion 
is an hypothesis scientifically untenable, as val- 
ueless scientifically as any other purely subjec- 
tive opinion, as valueless as any faith or any 
superstition you may be pleased to select. For 
if it be simply inconceivable how sensation and 
consciousness can arise from a mechanical move- 
ment or chemical combination of a number of 
atoms, the mental law of causality compels us 
to suppose that there is another cause for the 
existence of sensation, not a cause which ope- 
rates in a merely mechanical or chemical way. 

■^ Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, Yortrag, etc. , 
Leipzig, Veil, 1872, p. 25 seq. 



STRAUSS'S APPEAL TO DU BOIS - REYMOND. 133 

It compels us to distinguish the substances, the 
atoms endowed with the power of sensation 
from others which are invested with no more 
than physical and chemical forces. The former 
need by no means be purely immaterial; they 
may always possess physical and chemical forces 
in conjunction with the faculty of sensation, and 
may be subject to the operation of such forces. 
They may beside differ very much among each 
other. Nevertheless, as sentient beings, they 
stand over against the insentient in well-defined, 
insoluble antithesis. With justice, therefore, a 
special name has been given them — they are 
called " souls." Their actual existence contra- 
dicts the materialistic hypothesis, which acknowl- 
edges nothing but physical and chemical forces. 
This contradiction is so decided that none but 
philosophical dilettanti, who as a rule deal with 
logic in a very arbitrary fashion, or men who 
consciously or unconsciously are influenced by 
other than purely philosophical interests, can 
still cling to it. 

XX. 

STRAUSS'S APPEAL TO DU BOIS-REYMOND. 

[In Strauss's ''Word at the close, designed as 
a preface to the later editions of his Old Faith 

5 



134 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

and New Faith/'^ he attempts to weaken the 
force of the statement we have quoted from I)u 
Bois-Reymond, adapted as it is to shake the very 
foundation of his doctrine. This he does b}^ ap- 
pealing to Du Bois-Reymond himself, who does 
expressly acknowledge, that, in accordance with 
the known principle of investigation, to give the 
preference to the simpler conception of the cause 
of a phenomenon, until it be successfully con- 
futed, we shall constantly find our thinking drawn 
toward the conjecture, that if we were only able 
to comprehend the essential character of matter 
and force — the perpetual incomprehensibleness 
of which, according to Du Bois-Reymond, forms 
the second, or rather the first limit of our knowl- 
edge of nature — we might perhaps understand 
also, how the substance which lies at their base, 
could under certain determinate conditions have 
sensations, desires, and thoughts.f Du Bois- 
Reymond certainly expresses himself about it in 
this sense toward the end of the publication we 
have cited. And it is a matter that requires 
no argument, that the investigator of nature, 
though he be unable to understand either the 

* Ein Nachwort als Yorwort zu den neuen Auflagen 
meiner Schrift : Der Alte und der neue Glaubl. vierter Ab- 
druck. Bonn, 1873. 

f Quoted in Nachw. als. Yorw., 27, 28. 



STRAUSS'S APPEAL TO DU BOIS - RE YMOND. 135 

essential character of matter and force or the 
cause and origin of sensation, has no need to 
resort to dogmas and philosophemes about 
them, but unconfused by them can shape his 
own judgment as to the rehitions between spirit 
and matter. That is an open question to the 
investigator of nature as it is to everybody 
else. But the first question which arises is, 
whether these '' views " be tenable, whether 
they be more than subjective opinions, more 
than mere '' dogmas." But Strauss forgets, 
that Du Bois-Reymond not only regards the 
essential character of force and matter as purely 
incomprehensible, but expressly declares that 
the "atomistic representation" is "within cer- 
tain defined limits," not only useful, but in 
fact indispensable to the investigation of nature, 
but that if it be extended into a general, un- 
limited theor3% "it leads to hopeless contradic- 
tion."* It is this extension, however, into a gen- 
eral theory, exclusive in its character, allowing 
nothing but corporeal atoms, with their ph^'sico- 
chemical forces, which is the fundamental princi- 
ple of materialism, or, to speak more accurately, 
of that particular materialistic hj^pothesis on 
which Strauss grounds his new faith. Any 
compend of Natural Science would have shown 

* Grenze, etc., p. 9. 



136 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

him that the atomistic-materialistic view of 
nature is in fact nothing more to the investi- 
gator of nature than a " hypothesis.'' But every 
hypothesis is condemned as scientifically untena- 
ble, just as soon as it shows that it is unable to 
explain, or involves itself in hopeless contradic- 
tion in the attempt to explain, the phenomena 
which it is framed and adopted to explain. This 
is a principle which the student of science holds 
as inviolable, as without it the way is opened 
to every fortuitous whimsy, every arbitrary 
fancy, in a word to the utter overthrow of sci- 
ence. If Strauss then be unable to confute 
these deliberate judgments of Du Bois-Reymond, 
and this he has not even attempted to do, he 
must concede that his new faith, based upon the 
exclusive materialistic hypothesis, is destitute of 
all scientific confirmation. His defence shows 
no more than that those judgments are very in- 
convenient to him. It creates the impression 
of a fruitless struggle and solicitude to break 
away from their annihilating results. It is un- 
fortunate for him that the star, which has led 
him, already begins to pale, and that the mate- 
rialistic doctrine already shows that it is a fall- 
ing star rather than a true star. The rest of his 
"Word at the close" is nothing more than a 
defence of his religious and theological views 
against the numerous attacks made upon them 



THE NOTION OF DESIGN. 137 

from the most various quarters. We are con- 
sequently not concerned with it.] 

XXL 

THE NOTION OF DESIGN, IN THE I.IGHT OF NATURAL 
SCIENCE. PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. 

After this long ramble through the circle of 
the theories of the natural sciences, Strauss 
comes back to the investigation of the notion of 
design, in order that he may weaken the teleo- 
logic argument for the existence of God. Dar- 
win, who has opened the door for the expulsion 
of miracle, " has also removed from the expla- 
" nation of nature the notion of design, which 
" in the main coincides with the notion of mira- 
" cle.'' The notion of design, to wit, as Strauss 
in common with the older teleologists recog- 
nizes, involves consciousness thus far, that a 
spontaneous activity, conformable to a design, 
and yet without consciousness, is inconceivable. 
To speak, therefore, of an activity involving a 
final cause, setting before itself an aim, pursu- 
ing a plan, selecting the most fitting means, and 
yet to deny consciousness to such an activity, is 
simply self-contradiction. Strauss, therefore, 
rejects the philosophy of the unconscious, " the 
crotchet'' of E. von Hartmann, which assumes 
an unconscious absolute, which as completely as 



138 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

the conscious God of the teleological argument, 
with clearsighted wisdom, works bj^ plan and 
choice, and determines all that is embraced 
in creation and the process of the universe. 
Strauss justly remarks that this theory is but 
the change of a word, from which results the 
ascription to a pretended unconsciousness, of 
things done, and of a course of action, which 
can belong only to a conscious being. "If we 
are to suppose," he continues, " that an Uncon- 
" scious has brought to pass what appears to us 
"in nature as conformable to design, I must 
" conceive of its course of action in the case, 
" as of that nature which belongs to the Un- 
" conscious, that is, to speak with Helmholtz, 
" it must have swayed as a blind force of na- 
" ture, and yet have brought to pass something 
" which corresponds with a design. The newer 
"investigation of nature in Darwin has set us 
" above this point of view." He has shown that 
the natural " need," the " struggle for exist- 
ence " has "gradually fashioned, developed, and 
" perfected the organs of living things, in the 
" way best adapted to satisfy the growing need, 
" to maintain the struggle victoriously. Thus, 
" in the course of the ages, ever higher and 
" more perfect beings have resulted, more per- 
" feet because more highly endowed with the 
" faculties necessary to carry on the struggle in 



THE DOCTEINE OF FINAL CAUSES. 139 

" every direction under the most diverse condi- 
" tions and relations/'* 



XXII. 

THE SETTIKa ASIDE OF THE DOCTRCSrE OF FrSTAL 
CAUSES IN NATURE BY DARWIN. 

Were we to grant that the Darwinian theory 
is completely justified and established — which 
it by no means is — it yet seems to us that the 
notion of design and miracle, which it puts out 
at one door, it lets in at another. Considered 
simply as a theorj^ it is, at least in the appre- 
hension of it which Strauss furnishes, one-sided 
and inconsistent. For if it be nothing more 
than the diverse forms of need presenting 
themselves in the struggle for existence which 
controls organization, gradually shapes the or- 
gans, and then produces new genera and species, 
it follows that under some circumstances, retro- 
gressions may take place, and have taken place 
from the higher to the lower. The quadruped, 
for example, if a continent which had once been 
dry should be covered by vast inundations, will 
find himself confined to marshy, miry ground, 
and must consequently be able to turn back, and 

* Page 213, seq. Sechst. AuE. 218, seq. 



140 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

must actually, under these circumstances, have 
been turned back into the reptile. The reptile, 
if it be forced to live in a comparatively narrow 
space, surrounded by great bodies of water, will 
by degrees, under the pressure of hunger, be 
compelled to resume the nature of the fish. 
The theory of descendence can therefore logi- 
cally claim no more than a vacillation to and 
fro, according to circumstances, between higher 
and lower, between progression and retrogres- 
sion. Darwin himself consequently does not 
claim that there is a law of necessary rise and 
ultimate perfection in grade. Nevertheless, the 
theory, as the facts adduced in its support 
show, knows only of the rise and development 
of species ever higher and more perfect — a pro- 
cess which terminates in the appearing of a last, 
highest species, Man; and this is the very point 
which Strauss urges with special earnestness. 
To this inconsistency the theory moves involun- 
tarily. The facts of natural science established 
by palaeontology compel it so to move. But in so 
doing it falls helplessly again into the net of tele- 
ology, of which it imagined it had made a final 
disposition. For first of all, the primary lowest 
organisms must have been so planned that they 
were not merely in a general way "variable," 
but so that the variability of the individual 



THE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSES. 141 

members should have the definite tendency and 
inclination to vary from what was its original 
general type, in a manner adapted to its struggle 
for existence, and consequently to put forth 
organs fitted for and correspondent with the 
needs; in a word, organs formed or transformed 
in accordance with design. The same princi- 
ple holds good in regard to the entire series of 
genera and species which gradually comes forth 
from the struggle for existence. Had mere 
accident controlled the result, nothing but un- 
suitable varieties might have arisen, or the suit- 
able variations might have been so insignificant 
in number and importance that a higher organ- 
ization never would have been reached. The 
varieties must furthermore be so constituted 
that they must not only be able permanently to 
preserve themselves without retrogression, but 
their suitably formed organs must also, of them- 
selves, be developed and perfected ; that is, not 
only their primary formation, but their develop- 
ment also, must be in accordance with design. 
But even the external circumstances and rela- 
tions, the conditions of existence must have been 
originally so determined, and must in such sense 
change in the course of time, that other and yet 
other needs for the organism sprang from them. 
Otherwise the variations and new developments 



142 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

called forth by the need could neither take place 
nor attain permanence. It is required, there- 
fore, that there should intervene a series of ex- 
ternal conditions, circumstances and relations 
correspondent with the rise and preservation as 
well as with the sequence of the series which 
give themselves shape. Were it otherwise, no 
newer higher species could arise, and those 
which had arisen could not sustain themselves. 
Even in the domain of Geology, in the sequence 
of the stadia of the earth's development, there 
can be no domination of blind chance. Such a 
view is overthrown not onl}^ by the strength of 
the facts, but by the theory of descendence itself, 
as a theory. For chance can neither be in itself 
a theory, nor be brought into a theory. Theo- 
retical or theorized chance is a contradiction 
in the adjective, in no respects different from 
wooden iron. If then we are compelled to ac- 
cept a force which, on the one hand, so planned 
the organisms that in correspondence w^ith the 
needs which from time to time arose, they varied 
themselves, and in higher and yet higher grades 
transformed, developed, and perfected them- 
selves, and if this force, on the other hand, gave 
such direction to the external conditions, rela- 
tions, and circumstances, that they went hand 
in hand with the formation and development of 



THE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSES. 143 

the species, made their changes in harmony 
with them, and through the entire processes co- 
operated subserviently to them, we think we 
have in this a power whose activity involves a 
final cause, an adaptation to design. For we 
cannot escape the implicit adoption of the view 
that the formation of ever higher, more perfect 
species was the aim pursued by that force in its 
activity, and that in conformity with this aim 
and its ultimate actualizing, it determined and 
arranged not only the earliest germs of organic 
life, but, never losing sight of that aim, the ex- 
ternal conditions, circumstances, and relations 
necessary to it; in a word, that this force has se- 
lected, produced, and applied the means adapted 
to the attainment of its end. If, according to 
Strauss himself, such an activity is inconceiva- 
ble, unless it be superintended and accompanied 
by a consciousness, then is the statement false 
that Darwin has removed the notion of design 
from the explanation of nature, and has reduced 
to the swa}' of a "blind force of nature" what 
appears to us in nature as conformed to design. 
Darwin, in fact, even if it be against his wish 
and knowledge, has acknowledged the notion 
of design, and has done nothing more than trans- 
fer it from the known end, the ultimate point 
of the oro^anic creation, to the assumed beo;in- 



144 STKAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

iiings, the earliest origin and development of 
that creation. [l!^either Strauss nor Darwin 
has weighed the question whether the order and 
conformity with law which control ^organic 
nature do not presuppose the conscious, deliber- 
ate planning of a creative primitive force, and 
yet I believe I have clearly substantiated this 
position on the basis of natural science.*] 

XXIII. 

"how SHALL WE ORDER OUR LIFE?" 

In spite of the partiality for the " blind " force 
of nature, and the partiality it involves for the 
lawless caprice of chance, Strauss is a decidedly 
ethical nature, a defender of the right and of 
the moral law, who, as it were, contra nataram, 
in defiance of nature, merely as the result of 
his ardor in his conflict against the orthodox 
theology — a conflict originally warranted in 
some particulars — has become a sensualist and 
materialist. That is made very clear in the last 
division of his work, in which he answers the 
question, '' How shall we order our life ?" Here 
we meet almost unobjectionable propositions, 
with which, though under reservation and sepa- 

* Gott und die Natur, Zweit. Auflag. 420, 510 seq. 



"how SHALL WE ORDER OUR LIFE?" 145 

rating them entirely from their untenable foun- 
dation, we accord in the main. Especially is 
this the case with nearly all that he says on the 
political and social questions which so pro- 
foundly agitate our time. But it is just here 
we meet the grossest contradictions to his own 
premises. We shall cite only a few of the most 
striking ones. "The laws of the Decalogue," 
he says, in stating his views, '' we acknov/ledge to 
" have proceeded from the recognized needs of 
" human societj^ needs suggested by experience, 
" and in this fact lies the basis of their immutable 
" obligation for us. Still in this commutation, 
*' between an origin of the Decalogue in human 
" needs and an origin in divine Revelation, it is 
" impossible wholly to avoid the feeling that we 
" lose something. The divine origin of the laws 
"gave them sacredness; our view of their rise 
" seems to concede to them nothing more than 
" utility, or at most external necessity. There is 
" no way entirely to restore their sanctity except 
" by regarding their internal necessity, their com- 
" ing forth, not merely from social need, but from 
" the very nature or essential character of man."* 
This means that if it could be shown that these 
laws originated in man's own nature we should 

- Page 231, Sechst. Aufl. 235, 236. 



146 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

have to regard them as possessing the same sanc- 
tity as if they proceeded from the holy will of 
God. But this would involve the assumption 
that if the nature of man is to be esteemed holy, 
sanctit}^ is in some sense to be imputed to him. 
But in what sense does it pertain to him ? And 
if it did pertain to him, it could only have pro- 
ceeded from the social " necessity." For man 
himself is supposed to be through and through 
the creature of necessity. Through necessity, 
in the struggle for existence, man originally di- 
verged from the race of '' the primitive ape.'^ 
It is the necessity of social life, as we were told, 
which in man in common with the beasts, origi- 
nates and gives impulse to the moral feelings, 
the higher moral faculties. Man's development 
and consummation are originated, conditioned, 
and guided by necessity. How is it possible, 
then, that he should attain a nature or a being, 
w^hich can be anything more exalted than an in- 
soluble complex of manifold necessities, and of 
the faculties adapted to satisfy them ? 

XXIV. 

THE PRIMARY PRHSTCIPLE OF MORALITY. 

Strauss contests the correctness of Schopen- 
hauer's opinion that pity is the sole spring of 



THE PRIMARY PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY. 147 

morality, and that consequently man can have 
no duties toward himself. In contesting this 
view he takes the case of a young man who has 
been striving diligently and persistently to form 
himself, morall3\ "Beside his intellectual and 
" moral endowments the young man feels in 
"himself other powers, powers in the sphere of 
" the senses. These, like the former, strive for 
"active exercise and expansion — reveal, indeed, 
" an energy and violence which that higher im- 
" pulse is not able to command. If, neverthe- 
" less, he gives play to these impulses of sense 
" only so far as they do not stand in the way of 
"the expansion of the higher powers, we are 
"compelled to call it a moral mode of acting, 
" which cannot be deduced from pity, and which 
" seems in no respect the moral attitude of the 
" man to others, but entirely one to himself."* 
But whence does the young man derive the 
power to offer successful resistance to the domi- 
nating instincts of the senses? The impulses 
are no more than the consequence and expres- 
sion of the necessities; the stronger instinct cor- 
responds with the stronger necessity and con- 
versely. It would seem, therefore, as if a being 
who was purely the product of necessity, could 



^ P. 235, Sechst. Aiifl. 240. 



148 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

only be determined and guided in his entire 
conduct by what happens at the time to be the 
stronger instinct. Or are we after all to sup- 
pose that this is a freedom of will, a power of 
self-determination, sufficiently strong to impose 
restraint on the diflerent impulses, to hold them, 
as it were, in check, and to decide for itself by 
which of them its activities shall be controlled, 
or whether it shall be controlled by them at 
all ? Yes, is the reply of Strauss, there is such 
a thing as freedom of will. For " all the moral 
*' activity of man is a self-determining of the in- 
'' dividual in accordance with the generic idea 
'' of the race. First of all to actualize this in 
"himself, to shape and keep the individual in 
" conformity with the true notion and destina- 
" tion of humanity, is the sum and substance of 
" man's duty toward himself. Effectively to 
"recognize and to advance, in others, our race, 
"which in itself is equal, is the sum of our du- 
" ties to others, in which we are to distinguish 
" between the negative duty, which forbids us to 
" do anything in prejudice of the equal rights 
" of any one, and the positive duty of aiding 
" every one to the extent of our alnlity — in a 
" word, between the duties of justice and the 
" duties of love."^ Man, then, not only pos- 



* P. 236, Sechst. Aufl. 24L 



THE PRIMAEY PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY. 149 

sesses the faculty of self-determination, but he 
ought ''to determine himself in accordance with 
the idea of his race/^ Strauss proclaims, 
therefore, without further argument, the doc- 
trine of the freedom of the will, that much-con- 
tested doctrine, which is denied in downright 
terms, especially by the whole body of Sensual- 
ists and Materialists, which is in general sym- 
pathy with his views. With it he proclaims the 
imperative Shall of the moral law. But apart 
from every other consideration, such proclama- 
tions are, in their own nature, thoroughly un- 
scientific. Science cannot and dare not allow 
any man, not even so distinguished a man as 
Strauss, to decide a question of scientific con- 
troversy with a sic volo, sic jubeo — so I will, so I 
command. If Strauss desired to put in a word 
on this point, he was bound to take hold of the 
freedom of the will as a problem, and to present 
his reasons if he felt himself compelled to affirm 
it. He saves himself the trouble of doing any- 
thing of the sort. He decides the question 
without even telling us how this decision is to 
be brought into unison with his own premises 
and fundamental views. And yet it is a mani- 
fest contradiction in the adjective to impute 
the faculty of self-determination to a being 
"absolutely dependent'^ on nature. It is just 



150 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

as manifest a contradiction to take a creature of 
blind natural necessity and of its laws, a mech- 
anism built up and artificially held together by 
physical and chemical forces, the product of the 
development of natural necessities and of the 
instincts set in play by them, and endow such 
a creature with an " idea of its race,'' and with 
a "destination," which the entire kind, and 
every individual in it, is "bound in duty" to 
fulfil. Darwinism, indeed, knows nothing of 
either race or species; it expressly denies the 
existence of definite genera distinguished by 
permanent types, involving essential determi- 
nations. The originated "living substances" 
have, indeed, according to Darwinism, in the 
so-called " Atavism," to hold fast to the innate 
bias, the parental type; but in the " variability " 
the equally original adverse bias has to deviate 
from this type, and consequently from the idea 
of the race. Both factors are arrayed against 
each other with entirely equal claims, or rather 
the second factor, the impulse of variation, of in- 
dividualizing, has on its side the claim of neces- 
sity, the war-claim of the struggle for existence, 
the supremest claim which Darwinism recog- 
nizes. If, then, we grant that the individual 
can make a decision one way or the other, why 
should he be bound in duty to repudiate his 



THE PRIMARY PRINCIPLE OF MORALITY. 151 

individuality, and sacrifice his individual in- 
stincts, desires, and passions in favor of Atavism ? 
About all such questions Strauss gives himself 
no concern. He never even tells us in what 
his idea of humanity consists. He talks about 
the destination of man, but never defines it. 
Not until he has reached a later point, and then 
only, in passing, does he make the remark that, 
by the destination of humanity nothing more 
can be meant than ''the harmonious expansion of 
man's natural predispositions and capacities."* 
But he again fails to see that it still remains 
necessary to show how a being who consists of 
a physico-chemical combination of atoms, which 
are the original and sole supporters of all his 
natural predispositions and capacities, can pos- 
sibly be in a condition, by his actions, to con- 
tribute in the slightest measure to ''the harmo- 
"nious expansion of these capacities and pre- 
" dispositions," either by restraining them or by 
giving them more strength. In the very nature 
of the case it is clear, that if a machine is not 
so constructed that from the very beginning, 
and of necessity, its parts co-work in harmony, 
no one particular wheel, no single screw or 
spring — and consequently, by parity of reason. 



* P. 203, Sechst. Aufl. 269. 



152 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

no single part of the brain or nervous system — 
can produce the lacking harmony, or restore it 
if it be destroyed. A machine with self-deter- 
mination and moral oblio:ation is so manifest a 
contradiction in the adjective, that no man who 
is unwilling to talk of wooden iron will venture 
to talk of such a machine. 



XXV. 

STRAUSS'S ATTEMPT TO SHOW THAT HE DOES NOT 
HOLD THAT THE UNIYERSE IS A THINO OF CHANCE. 

To all this we may suppose Strauss to reply 
that it is not his view that the universe is a 
mere machine, a product of blind chance; that 
he has explicitly declared that nothing which we 
perceive in and about us, nothing which we and 
others experience, is "an isolated fragment, a 
"wild chaos of atoms or accidents, but that all 
"proceeds according to eternal laws from the 
"one primal source of all life, of all reason and 
"all good;" that consequently reason is to be im- 
puted to man, and that his whole life, acts and 
conduct should be conformed to it. Strauss 
has undoubtedly asserted all this.* But he has 
nowhere shown us how this is to be brought 

^ See p. 239, Sechst. Aufl. 244, and in other passages. 



THE UNIVERSE NOT A THING OF CHANCE. 153 

into unison with the ^' blind" force of nature, 
which not only rules in the inorganic world, 
but has brought forth the first germs of life by 
a physical chemical mingling of atoms, and 
under the autocracy of blind necessity has de- 
veloped them into mankind. We are com- 
pelled to ask, therefore, What is this reason? 
in what way does it work? and how is it to be 
distinguished from the rule of blind chance? 
As we have shown that the "delicate, mild, 
tender," cannot, without more proof than has 
been adduced, be identified with the good and 
rational, there remains for the reason which 
rules in the world, no other notion than that of 
necessity and conformity with law. On this 
then Strauss ultimately falls back at the "con- 
clusion " of his discussions, where he again has 
occasion to speak of his new faith. He there 
says:* "Our God (the universe) shows us in- 
"deed that chance would be an irrational ruler 
" of the world, but that necessity, that is, the con- 
" catenation of causes in the world, is reason it- 
" self." Why the concatenation of causes in the 
world is coincident with reason, in what respect 
this necessity is rational, we are as remote from 
learning, as we were at the earlier proclamation 

* P. 365, Sechst. Aufl 372. 



154 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

that the rational is the delicate and tender, and 
yet it is manifestly by no means necessary that 
all necessity as such, that every concatenation 
of causes should also be rational, that an irra- 
tional concatenation should be impossible. At 
all events this '^necessity" is and remains a 
"blind" power of nature. For that a spiritual, 
conscious power controls the world and con- 
catenates the causes, the operative forces, is de- 
nied and contested by Strauss from the begin- 
ning of his book to the end of it. The reason 
for w^hich he argues distinguishes itself from 
chance, therefore, by being blind necessity, 
w^hile chance is usually designated as blind 
caprice; the latter might also, though but for- 
tuitously, have brought forth the delicate and 
tender, beside the coarse and harsh. But what 
does it matter whether blind necessity or blind 
caprice, with reason or without reason, concate- 
nates the forces which work in nature? If man 
be "absolutely dependent" on them and their 
concatenation, we cannot speak of self-determi- 
nation or freedom, of rational or irrational de- 
cisions of the will. On the contrary, blind 
caprice might have endowed yet earlier the be- 
ing it brought forth with a power of capricious 
volition and working, resembling itself; the do- 
minion of blind necessity absolutely excludes 



NATURE COMING TO SELF - RECOGNITION. 155 

everything suggestive of caprice, freedom, self- 
determination. Strauss's view therefore stands 
fast by the wooden iron of a being who is "ab- 
solutely dependent," and yet " self-determining.'^ 

XXVI. 

NATURE COMINO TO SELF-RECOGNITION. 

But Strauss goes yet further. In what fol- 
lows he not only ascribes reason to this blindly 
working necessity, but also attributes to it will, 
and that, too, a will to recognize itself! He be- 
gins with citing a judgment expressed by Moriz 
Wagner, that " the most important general re- 
" suit revealed to us by comparative geology 
"and palaeontology is the great law of progress 
" which rules in nature. From the most ancient 
" eras of the history of the earth, which have 
'' left traces of organic life, down to creation as 
"it is at present, this steady progress in the ap- 
" pearing of more highly organized beings than 
" those of the past is a fact firmly established by 
" experience ; and this fact is perhaps the most 
" consolatory of all the truths which science has 
" ever attained." Strauss then goes on to say: 
"In this ascending movement of life man also 
"is embraced, and in such a way that in him 
"the organic plastic force on our planet has 



156 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL, THINKER. 

" reached its climax. As it cannot go further, 
" cannot go beyond itself, it will enter into 
'' itself. Hegel's expression — reflecting self in 
"self — was a thoroughly good one. In the 
"animal, nature had a sensation of herself : but 
" she w^ills also to have recognition of herself.""^ 
An astounding declaration ! Blindly working 
unconscious nature, with her Reason destitute of 
personality and consciousness, unable to go 
further, to go beyond herself, enters into herself, 
in order to attain self-recognition, and by this 
means to reach at last consciousness and self- 
knowledge ! But how does nature come to take 
such an extraordinary fancy ? What is to pre- 
vent her going " further" beyond herself, inas- 
much as the great law of progress proves that 
she is quite able to go " beyond herself?" And 
above all — this boundless plurality of atoms of 
w^hich nature consists, and in the unceasing al- 
ternation of the combinations and separations 
of which she produces and reproduces herself — 
how does it come to pass that it " enters into it- 
self, to reflect itself in itself?" Can an atom 
of hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon, or any mass of 
them, combine them as you will, reflect itself in 
itself? Is not this reflection in itself an activity 

* P. 240, Sechst. Aufl. 244, 245. 



KATURE COMING TO SELF - RECOGNITION. 157 

which can be put forth only by a being with 
soul, or intellect, a being bearing a " Self" in 
itself? Strauss, as we have seen, has pro- 
nounced thoroughly unnatural a self-conscious 
rule of nature, acting in accordance with plan 
and design, and has lauded Darwin as the 
greatest benefactor of mankind, for setting aside 
forever the notion of design in this sense. And 
now we have nature creating man, and in him 
reflecting herself in herself, so that in him she 
may recognize herself! But if JSTature ever 
adopted this unnatural determination, and if 
she really had the power of creating man, in 
order to execute her will through him, in his 
recognition of Self and of Nature, would it not 
have been more accordant with her design, as 
well as a shorter and simpler way, instead of 
making this wide circuit, to have reflected her- 
self at once in herself, and thus have reached 
the desired self-recognition at the outstart ? For 
what good would she derive from this trailing 
self-recognition, embracing as it would her 
doing and her working only when it was too 
late — after everything was finished ? Is not 
this style of proceeding irrational ? And this 
blindly swaying Nature, which knows nothing 
and recognizes nothing, and yet is striving after 



158 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

self-recognition, does it not come again into the 
category of the wooden iron ? 



XXVII. 

STRAUSS' S DIRECT CONTRADICTION OF HIMSELF. 

Strauss has so little dread of the contradic- 
tory, that not satisfied with the indirect and im- 
plicit, he involves himself in the most direct 
and express self-contradictions. Thus, for ex- 
ample, we first find him teaching us that nature, 
after her organic plastic force has reached, in 
man, its climax, " could go no further, beyond 
herself,^' and consequently entered into herself. 
But on the next page he asserts* that "in man 
" nature has not merely in a general way willed 
" upwards, but has willed out beyond herself; 
" man, therefore, should not only not relapse 
" into the animal, he should be more, he should 
" be something better." Nature, consequently, 
though she could not go further, beyond herself, 
has at least loilled out beyond herself. In fact, 
she has not merely willed it, but has made the 
impossible possible. For man exists, and he 



* P. 241, Sechst. Aufl. 246. 



STRAUSS^S CONTRADICTION OF HIMSELF. 159 

not only " should ^' and " can " be more than a 
mere animal over again, but the man of moral 
standing and moral conduct is more. It is true 
he cannot totally avoid "the rough, hard strug- 
gle for existence " which in the animal kingdom 
had already had such an abundant sway: "So 
"far he is still a being of nature, but he ought 
" to know how to ennoble and soften the strug- 
"gle in accordance with the measure of his 
"higher faculties.^^ Man is consequently no 
longer a mere "being of nature," he has "high- 
er" faculties, in the harmonious expansion of 
which, and by the embodiment of which in his 
actions, he exalts h\mse]{ above nature. Nature 
has then, in fact, succeeded in finally passing 
out beyond herself; she has succeeded in get- 
ting loose from herself, in reaching out beyond 
herself, beyond her own measure, her own 
strength, her own essential nature. She has 
succeeded, consequently, in becoming super- 
natural. In brief, she has brought to a happy 
issue the seemingly impossible feat of leaping 
away from herself. She has jumped out of her 
skin ! If she be capable of such performances, 
we no longer wonder that she is capable of con- 
tradicting herself, and that she cannot only will 
and do contradictory things, but is able to think 
them. 



160 STEAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL, THINKER, 



XXVIII. 

STRAUSS'S IDEAL STRIVIKGS. HIS RECOGNITION 
OF MYSTERY. 

After man has been thus hypostatized into a 
being half natural, half supernatural, or a being 
"yet" natural, though supernatural, we need 
scarcely wonder longer that Strauss speaks of 
"ideal strivings,""^ that he maintains that by 
"the giving of the higher position to the indi- 
"vidual with his material necessities and de- 
"mands, the loftier interests, the interests of 
"the spirit are imperilled, "f and that he de- 
cidedly disapproves of "the direction which by 
"pre-eminence both science and education take 
"in America toward the exact and practical, 
"the serviceable and the utilitarian." In his 
charming zeal for science and art he forgets that 
for Darwinists and Alaterialists there can be 
absolutely no ideal strivings, no higher intellec- 
tual "interests" overbalancing the material ne- 
cessities and demands, no science which does 
not ask after the serviceable and the utilitarian. 
His forgetfulness indeed extends so far that in 
defending the monarchial constitution against 

^ P. 259. 

t P. 265, SecLst. Aufl. 270, 271. 



STRAUSS'S IDEAL STRIVINGS. 161 

the republicans, he enunciates the proposition : 
''Every mystery seems absurd, and yet there is 
'' nothing profound, neither life, nor art, nor 
''state, without mystery." We attach great 
value to such instances of self-forgetfulness on 
the part of Strauss as a man, but considering 
them as the words of Strauss the philosophical 
thinker, the harbinger of the faith of the future, 
we cannot allow them to pass without remind- 
ing him that the proposition to which he has 
committed himself involves the best defence of 
religion in general, and of Christianity in par- 
ticular, and breaks the point of his arguments 
against the old faith. If there be nothing pro- 
found without mystery, it is difficult to see why 
religion, the profoundest thing to which man 
is able to attain, and especially the Christian 
religion, should be made exceptions, and the 
mystery which surrounds them be urged to 
their disadvantage, and made a reason for their 
extirpation. Even the God of the new faith, 
the Universe, as the primal source of all reason 
and of all good, still bears in its bosom, as we 
have shown, very much that is mysterious, un- 
explained, and uncomprehended. But should 
Strauss propose to distinguish between mystery 
and mystery, to grant one kind and repudiate 
another, he must be able to furnish a safe cri- 



162 STRAUSS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THINKER. 

terion for the separation of the true mystery 
from the false one. Or are we to suppose that 
there are grades of the mysterious, so that when 
it passes beyond a certain measure it is no longer 
to be tolerated? This does not seem to be 
Strauss's view. For the last bound of all the 
mystical is the contradictory, and it is this pre- 
cise bound beyond which, as we have seen, 
Strauss passes only too often. 

XXIX. 

CONCLUSION. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY. 

The two "Supplements" which Strauss has 
added, bearing the titles, " Our Great Poets" 
and " Our Great Musicians," do not fall within 
the province of this notice. We do not propose, 
in the slightest degree, to disturb him in his 
sesthetic enjoyment, which to him supplies pre- 
eminently the place of religious edification ; we 
are not going to call into doubt his high aesthetic 
culture; we see no reason for depreciating his 
aesthetic judgment, which, indeed, we consider 
entirely sound, and which furnishes new evi- 
dence of his profoundly ethical nature. Still 
even here it is once more wholly incomprehen- 
sible how, in pure beauty, that thoroughly use- 
less, unserviceable thing, the Darwinian man, can 



CONCLUSION — THE NEW PHILOSOPHY. 163 

find such a cordial, inspirino; delight ! Nor shall 
we go on to demonstrate — a thing very easy to do 
— that the ''compensation'^ which the new re- 
ligion pretends to furnish for the vanished con- 
solations of the old religion, for the assurance of 
reconciliation with God, for faith in Providence, 
for the hope of a loftier and better being, the 
compensation which Strauss* proflers us at the 
close of his book is in truth no compensation at 
all. We are concerned here, not with Strauss 
as critic, either sesthetical or theological, not with 
Strauss as dogmatician, or as a teacher of re- 
ligion, but simply with Strauss as a philosophical 
thinker. And of Strauss in that aspect we be- 
lieve we have sufficiently shown that his new 
philosophy, for even it is new as contrasted with 
the philosophy of his earlier view of the world, 
is no philosophy at all, inasmuch as it is the per- 
sistent carrying through of a renunciation of 
all logic. 

^ P. 364 seq. Secbst. Aufl. 370 seq. 



INDEX 



Adam, 46 
Agassiz, 16, 51 
America, 38, 51, 160 
Animals, 125 
Ape, 45, 46, 125, 128 
Aristotle, 15, 22, 51 
Atavism, 150 
Atheism, 50, 56, 78 
Atoms, 131 



Baader, 49 
Bad, 103 
Baer, von, 52 
Barnard, 53, 54 
Beyschlag, 40 
Biela's comet, 113 
Bismarck, 58, 59 
Bohner, 31 
Bronn, 53 
BUchner, 31, 54 



Carriere, 36,48 
Carus, 53 
Casualist, 102 
Causality, 81-84 

notion and mental law of, 87 
Chance, 103 
Child, 81 
Christ, 50 
Christianity, 45 
Christians, 43, 78 
Clausius, 52 
Comets, 113 
Comte, 19 



Conscience, 126 

Contradictions in the adjective, 

89, 93, 108, 111, 142 
Cuvier, 51 
Czolbe, 53 



Darwin, 16, 90, 120-123, 137.138, 
143, 157 

Darwinian theory, Darwinism, 
24, 45, 120, 122, 125, 139-143, 
150, 162 

Des Cartes, 22 

Descendence, 125 
I Diderot, 21, 46 
i Discovery, 100 
I Discussions, 31 
I r>og, 126 

I Donders, 52, 56, 130 
I Dove, 37, 42 

! Du Bois-Reymond, 52, 56, 131, 
I 133-136 



Earth, 110 

Eisenlohr, 51, 123, 124 
Eleatics, 109 
Encke's comet, 114 
Epictetus, 41 
Epicureans, 94 
Erdmann, 27 



Fahri, 31 

Faith, the new, 33, 34, 74, 98 

Fear. 80-83 



6 



166 



INDEX. 



Fechner, 52 

Feuerbach, 31, 41. 42, 93 

Fichte, 1, 4, 22, 31, 37, 40, 48, 

49, 71 
Finite, 111 
Freedom, 105 
Frenzel, 37, 40, 45 
Frohschammer, 31, 37, 47 



Generatio sequivoca, 116 
Goethe, 58, 60, 61 
Good, 104 
Gravitation, 123 
Greeks, 84 



Haeckel, 53 

Hartmann, von, 41, 106, 137 

Hausrath, 37, 41 

Hegel, 22, 49, 71 

Helmholtz, 16, 22, 52, 129 

Herbart, 49 

Huber, 36, 49, 124 

Humboldt, 16, 58 

Hume, 41 

Huxley, 54 



Incarnation, 128 
Inconsistency, 49 
Infinite, 108 
Inorganic, 116 
Instincts, 126 
Interest, points of, 39 
Introduction, 72 



Jesus, 44, 50, 61 



Kant, 22,41, 51, 52, 113 
Kekule, 123 
Knoodt, 36 
Koelliker, 53 
Krause, 49 



Lamarck, 51 



La Mettrie, 21 

Laplace, 51, 113 

Lang, H., 64 

Lang, W., 40 

Lazarus, 49 

Leibnitz, 22 

Lessing, 60 

Lewes, 19 

Liebig, 51 

Life, 116 

Living substances, 116-120 

Logic, 99, 163 

Lotze, 16, 22, 48, 49, 71 

Luther. 61 

Lyell, 117 



Mariana, 38 

Materialism, 9, 13, 23, 25, 27, 

30, 78, 106, 128 
Materialists, 103, 106 
Mazzini, 63 
Metaphysics, 17 
Metempyrics, 20 
Meyer, J. B., 37 
Michelis, 36, 41 
Miracles, 121 

Mischievous tendencies, 58 
Moleschott, 31, 47 
Monotheism, 84 
Morality, 105 
Miiller, J., 51, 52 
Munchausen, 89 
Mystery, 161 



Nagele, 53 

Natural theology, 57 

Nature, 159 

New England, 25 

Newton, 51, 123 

Nippold, 37, 38, 39, 71 



Oken, 51 
Optimism, 107 
Organic, 115 



INDEX, 



167 



Pascal, 22 
People, 62 
Pessimism, 106 
Philosophical spirit, 18 
Philosophy, 163 
Phillipson, 33, 37, 40, 41 
Physicists, 22 
Planck, 53 

Political elements, 63 
Polytheism, 84 
Positivism, 19 
Priestcraft, 48 



Rational, 102 

Rauwenhoflf, 38, 39, 58, 64, 66 

Reactionary tendency, 65 

Reimarus, 51 

Religion, 11, 79-95 

Review.ers, 35 

Ritter, 49 

Rome, 66 



Schaller, 22, 31 

Schelling, 22, 49 

Schleiden, 53 

Schleiermacher, 93 

Scholten, 38, 53 

Schopenhauer, 26, 41, 66, 106, 

147 
Science, 10 
Sensation, 128 
Sensualism, 128 
Smith, H. B, 38 
Snell, 53 

Solar systems, 110 
Soul, 128 
Species, 120 
Sporri, 37, 65 
Sterling, 58 
Strauss, 14, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 



69, 73, 75, 79, 89-98, 115-137, 

162 
Stutz, 38 
Supernatural, 12, 149 



Teleology, 90, 137, 139 
Theism, 68 
Tittmann, 31 
Trendlenburg, 49, 71 
Trinity, 100 
Tyndall, 16, 33, 55 



Ulrici, 14. 22, 29, 31, 49, 56, 69, 

70, 92, 113 
Unconscious, 137 
Universal, 98, 153 



Vera, 38 
Vierordt, 53 
Virchow, 116 
Vogt, 31, 41, 45, 47 
Voltaire, 41, 46 
Von Holbach, 21 



Wagner, M., 155 
Wagner, R., 51 
Warmth, 129 
"We," 45, 75, 100 
Weis, 37 
Weisse, 48, 49 
Will, 103 
Wirth, 49 
World, 109 
Wundt, 53 



Ziegler, 38 
Zierngebel, 36 



WORKS OF DR. KRAUTH, 



FOR SALE BY SMITH, ENGLISH & CO. 



Strauss as a Philosophical Thinker. 

Prom the German of Ulrici. With an Introduction. 
12mo. 1874, $1.00 

Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. 

With Prolegomena and Annotations. 8vo. 1874, $3 50 

The Conservative Reformation and its Theology. 

8vo.,pp. 858. 1871, $5.00 

The Vocabulary of Philosophy. 

By Fleming. With an Introduction, Chronology, Bib- 
liographical Index, Synthetical Tables, and other Addi- 
tions. Second Edition. 12mo., pp. 686. 1873, . $2.50 

Tholuck's Commentary on John. 

Translated from the Sixth and Seventh Editions. 8vo. 
1872, $3.00 



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